{"product_id":"the-nightfields-isbn-9780143135395","title":"The Nightfields","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003eA \u003ci\u003eWASHINGTON POST \u003c\/i\u003eBEST POETRY COLLECTION OF 2020\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA new collection from a poet whose books \"are an amazing experience: harrowing, ravishing, essential, unstoppable\" (Louise Glück)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Joanna Klink's fifth book begins with poems of personal loss--a tree ripped out by a windstorm, a friendship broken off after decades, the nearing death of parents. Other poems take on the cost of not loving fully, or are written from bewilderment at the accumulation of losses and at the mercilessness of having, as one ages, to rule things out. There are elegies for friends, and a group of devotional poems. \u003ci\u003eThe Nightfields\u003c\/i\u003e closes with thirty-one metaphysical poems inspired by the artist James Turrell's Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in Arizona that Turrell has been transforming into an observatory for the perception of time. The sequence unfolds as a series of revelations that begin in psychic fear and move gradually toward the possibility of infinitude and connection.\u003cb\u003e\u003cu\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eThe Nightfields\u003c\/i\u003e:\u003c\/u\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The hushed and meditative poems in this intensely lovely book manage somehow to feel simultaneously old-fashioned and cutting-edge. Amidst the chaotic noise and incessant annoyances of contemporary life, Klink’s poetry carves out a space in which we are reminded what it is like for an individual consciousness to encounter the awesome mysteries of both the outer universe and the inner self.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e, “Best Poetry Collections of 2020”\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What [Klink] hopes for again and again in this expansive, remarkable volume, her fifth, is the ability to see the universe whole.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Whatever we consider authentic 'being' to be, poetry can provide a vessel for rejoining it—especially poetry that refuses all but the most direct line to what is essential. This is what Klink accomplishes here in her beautiful fifth book, as she recalls the most elemental and fleeting gifts in our ephemeral lives . . . Klink’s ability to see deeply into things, whether in the made or natural world, is unusual for a poet who mines emotional experience with such relentlessness.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eKenyon Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In this collection Klink solidifies herself as a poet of lyric wonderment, angular beauty, and uncompromising vision. There is something of Merwin—and Strand—in Klink’s gestural approach to interrogating the self’s provisionality, with echoes of the deeply emotive, yet coolly delivered poems of Jon Anderson. At the center of Klink’s lyric resides the tension between profound emotional intensity and profound emotional delicacy.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePoetry Northwest\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Klink is a vatic poet, a seer not just of the body but of bodies in relationship to one another, bodies in relation to the natural world, to the universe both inner and outer . . . Perhaps more than any other poet writing today, Joanna Klink is the Romantic poet of our age, and like the great romantic poets, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, the narrator of \u003ci\u003eThe Nightfields\u003c\/i\u003e is often walking through her poems, attuned to the silences and quiet murmurings of the world.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eNew York Journal of Books\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“That grief is proof of love was something I needed to hear every day of 2020, and into 2021, and still and always. I read from \u003ci\u003eThe Nightfields\u003c\/i\u003e most mornings for the vertiginous pleasure of scale, for the sense of intimacy and infinitude, in order to feel my insignificance in the world. Our relative insignificance, our like-it-or-not interconnectedness, Klink reminds us, is not such a bad thing to feel. And besides, it is a fact. Remember: 'you are the brief errand of what was \/ given to you in unceasing splendor.’” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePoetry Daily\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“‘When I go toward you \/ it is with my whole life’—thus Joanna Klink opens her fifth collection, \u003ci\u003eThe Nightfields\u003c\/i\u003e, with Rilke . . . As we carry forward in her book of hours, Klink builds an understanding with our inevitable disappearance. Though the consciousness of the self disappears, she reminds us that there is a ‘heat born in you \/ that outlasts you, there are burning \/ circuits of stars’ and ‘More even \/ than your own life, you flow from what is’ . . . Our diminishment is a return to the splendor of our substance.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eSeneca Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Joanna Klink’s \u003ci\u003eThe Nightfields\u003c\/i\u003e has all the visionary lucidity and incisiveness that marks the true originality of her work. The subtlety of what she sees is matched by a language at once hospitable and unsettling. This book has the fluency of someone knowing and finding their way. These are remarkable poems.” \u003cb\u003e—Adam Phillips\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Klink writes with exquisite poignancy, an expansive and stark lyric that has become her signature in this collection. \u003ci\u003eThe Nightfields \u003c\/i\u003ereminds us that ‘to want a simple life \/ might mean \/ to have given up \/\/ on expectation’ yet the collection offers us of the privilege of Klink’s discerning and sometimes ruthless eye on what it means to live from that expectation, to live fully among the wreckage and the triumph.” \u003cb\u003e—Carmen Giménez Smith\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Joanna Klink goes toward poetry with her whole life. To me, she is a landscape poet, who draws more than paints. Her poems contain stars and bone; hope and mercy; meteorology and friendship. Instead of plot, there is subplot, allowing language and feeling to run free. Perhaps there is a spiritual dimension, too, with a pilgrimage through cities and grasslands. In our prosaic age, Klink is a completely original poet—symbolic and vatic—rendering the best poems of her life.” \u003cb\u003e—Henri Cole\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cu\u003ePraise for Joanna Klink:\u003c\/u\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In a culture inclined to mistake opacity for depth and stridency for passionate feeling, Joanna Klink has made a body of work at once utterly lucid and breathtakingly urgent. She navigates between those most suspicious extremes, despair and ecstasy, without ever seeming to be a poet dependent on extremes.  Taken together, her books are an amazing experience: harrowing, ravishing, essential, unstoppable.” \u003cb\u003e—Louise Glück, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award citation\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[Klink's] poems illuminate the membrane between loneliness and solitude.” \u003cb\u003e—Terrance Hayes, author of \u003ci\u003eAmerican Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Klink writes love poems to nature . . . Walt Whitman might find something to envy in the way Klink's more gentle sense of song tumbles out of simple, individual acts of attention.” —\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eChicago Tribune\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“[Klink's] work is a record not only of the ecstasy of engagement with the natural world, but also of the mixed and passionately felt consequences of detachment from a noisier, more chaotic world.”\u003ci\u003e \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eBoston Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eJoanna Klink is the author of four books of poetry. She has received awards and fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Jeannette Haien Ballard, Civitella Ranieri, the Bogliasco Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Trust of Amy Lowell, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She is teaching at the Michener Center in Austin.\u003cb\u003eTHE INFINITIES \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI don't know when it began,\u003cbr\u003ethe will to sort moment\u003cbr\u003efrom moment, to hold\u003cbr\u003eon by saying I can't\u003cbr\u003ecare about the red maple\u003cbr\u003estripped of color, I choose\u003cbr\u003ethe rain disappearing \u003cbr\u003eat my feet. I choose\u003cbr\u003ethis friend to love, the deep\u003cbr\u003eblacks of summer. Abandon\u003cbr\u003ethe rest. I am unable to\u003cbr\u003epicture anything so whole\u003cbr\u003eit doesn't crush what's\u003cbr\u003emissing. Is it my body across\u003cbr\u003emany seasons turning\u003cbr\u003ealready a little to bone,\u003cbr\u003eor the slow stars precisely\u003cbr\u003eset in depths so vast\u003cbr\u003ethe sky is just a dome\u003cbr\u003ewithin falling domes. \u003cbr\u003eHow is the snowfield\u003cbr\u003escattered with dry leaves already\u003cbr\u003ea pavillion of twilight. And my arms\u003cbr\u003ejust a motion in the great\u003cbr\u003esoundlessness of sky.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI have traded childhood\u003cbr\u003eexuberance for for fragile\u003cbr\u003eacts. I will slip into\u003cbr\u003ecorner tables just to watch\u003cbr\u003epeople speak. I love the way\u003cbr\u003ethey lean into each other\u003cbr\u003eor stretch back with the bluespun \u003cbr\u003elanguor of an evening, lights \u003cbr\u003estrung up on the wood\u003cbr\u003eceiling to mimic the lift of \u003cbr\u003estars. There are no\u003cbr\u003eempty hopes. But knowing\u003cbr\u003ewhat to hope for is steady\u003cbr\u003ework. What was ever\u003cbr\u003eso important to you you left\u003cbr\u003eyour daily life to heed it?\u003cbr\u003eI don't even know what\u003cbr\u003ebreathes in the dark hills\u003cbr\u003eoutside this town. Some\u003cbr\u003emornings the roads almost\u003cbr\u003efloat, the weeds in the fields\u003cbr\u003ewiry fistfuls of sun. What \u003cbr\u003ewere you looking out for?\u003cbr\u003eWhat did you dismiss along the way.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBecause we live we are granted\u003cbr\u003enames, streams, shocks of\u003cbr\u003eheat, murmuring summers.\u003cbr\u003eAll the days you have\u003cbr\u003eever breathed are swallows\u003cbr\u003eshooting between trees.\u003cbr\u003eWhen the wind pushes\u003cbr\u003e branches in and out of\u003cbr\u003eshade it is an opening,\u003cbr\u003eas every small gesture\u003cbr\u003etoward another person is\u003cbr\u003eincomprehensibly alive.\u003cbr\u003eWill you be part of the\u003cbr\u003estoneless passage? When life\u003cbr\u003estarts to take things away\u003cbr\u003ewill you grow very still \u003cbr\u003ebeneath the larch\u003cbr\u003eor feel the slow flight of birds\u003cbr\u003eacross your body.\u003cbr\u003eThe bright key of morning.\u003cbr\u003eThe bay fanned with foam.","brand":"Penguin Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304610484453,"sku":"NP9780143135395","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780143135395.jpg?v=1767740732","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-nightfields-isbn-9780143135395","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}