The Nightfields

A new collection from a poet who has made "a body of work at once utterly lucid and breathtakingly urgent" (Louise Glück). Joanna Klink's fifth book begins with personal poems of 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 disbelief 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. The Nightfields closes with "Night Sky," thirty metaphysical poems inspired by the artist James Turrell's Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in Arizona that Turrell has been transforming into an open-air observatory for the perception of time. The sequence unfolds as a series of revelations that begin in psychic fear and move gradually toward a sense of infinitude and connection.