Night Unto Night

Night Unto Night is a collection of six poetic sequences, each composed of 28, 30, or 31 short sections or poems. During one month each year, for twelve years, Martha Collins wrote several lines each day—usually six or seven, though the form changed slightly each month. The first six months were published as Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2014); Night Into Night brings together the last six, and is not so much a sequel to the earlier book as a continuation of it.

In this luminous companion to Day Unto Day, Collins renders the most humbling, gorgeous, and inscrutable features of human existence as if they might be made legible. Collins draws on sacred texts, figures, and rituals to arrive at a very earthly knowledge of finitude—of one’s own mind and body, as well as of beloved others.”                   —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Existential questions, great and small, animate the devotional poetics of Martha Collins. Readers of Collins’s extensive oeuvre will recognize in these books a richly textured poetics. Intimacy, love, and mortality are never far from the poet’s daily meditations, and yet they also record broader circulations of events in the world. Collins reminds us, as our best poets do, of the layered complexities of lived experience.”    —Plume Poetry (review of Day Unto Day and Night Unto Night)

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from Leaving Behind

          November 2015

1

Open up for close
out    soul-clothes    every-
thing has to go    closing

down time    call them all
saints    souls    my own gone

ones:  Andy    Marcia    Mary Alice
Mary Anne     cloud of all    carried out

 
2

outside my window: locust, cloth
of gold     on the ground: its yellow

tabs   linden hearts   sweetgum stars
like cut-outs from the same ...    

paper-napkin ghosts in a tree near
the house where a year ago my friend — 

rust-colored chrysanthemums   rust-colored door

 
3

door to door the angel no the Lord
passed or did not pass — 

the angel opened the prison
door     doors to pass through, out
or in:  our millions, more than any — 

in the other story the Lord
said:  to put a difference between


4

Between one and another
a gun: at one end it's a good

gun because at the other's a cell
phone pill bottle toy gun nothing a

Trayvon   Tamir   Dontre   Michael
Laquan   Eric   Rekia   John:   call

them out and the others, black and many

_______