If you have grieved you have loved. Twinned,like the sun’s thread-corona, the moon’s deepeningpearl. The violent deaths of stars an expansethrough which everything moves—lights thrownfrom collapse. You are coastal, throatless,roaming through people that hold tight then let go.You are the blue forest through which sunbeamssweep. And you are nothing but actions of the loomthreading aster and hunger. You are nothing but roadsinterrupted by wheels. What will be left in usbut pure admiration? Dust released into night.
Night Sky (excerpt)
Joanna Klink
Feature Date
- July 19, 2021
Series
- What Sparks Poetry
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“If you have grieved you have loved” from THE NIGHTFIELDS by Joanna Klink, copyright © 2020 by Joanna Klink.
Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
All rights reserved.
Joanna Klink is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Nightfields, which was published by Penguin last July. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies, including Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now and The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century Poetry. She has received awards and fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, the Bogliasco Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Trust of Amy Lowell, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.
"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."
—The Washington Post, “Best Poetry Collections of 2020”
"What [Klink] hopes for again and again in this expansive, remarkable volume, her fifth, is the ability to see the universe whole."
—The New York Times Book Review
"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."
—Henri Cole
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