- Publisher: Milkweed Editions
- Available in: Paperback, Kindle
- ISBN: 978-1-57131-489-5
- Published: March 13, 2018
More Poems from this Book
For the complete text of Leaving Behind, see Poetry Magazine
See also Plume Poetry, which includes author’s comments about Day Unto Day and Night Unto Night
More about this Book
See also Plume Poetry, which includes author’s comments about Day Unto Day and 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)
This is one of those collections that is not explicitly political, but which still seems to be directly protesting against the violence, the cruelty, the waste, the impermanence, the loss so present in our world. Paired with her previous collection, Day Unto Day, Martha Collins’s Night Unto Night looks at the ways we crash and clash and repeat the same mistakes over and over again, as well as the redemption available in the human experience.” —Bustle
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 _______