Sometimes my mind goes back to certain things.Like everyone’s.Like to the woman who asked meWhat keeps you awake at night?She wanted a writerly, magical answer.A black forest, a shining maid walking through it.The woman—she was a guest, a visiting artist.I was a guest to her visitingness: polite guestat an affable table.My neck, I said, meaning painof the basest physical kind. Meaning alsosadness, and worry—though I didn’t say so.I’d done enough, I’d said the neck thingas if I were snapping a chicken for supper.The woman smiled through it, a pro.Oh, I’m sorry, she said, pushing the shining maidinto a closet and shutting the door in a hushedand magical way.I wanted to bind her with rope.I wanted to watch her struggle, if just for a minute.The mind goes back, the heart goes with it, the forestwhirls all around. InsteadI was kind to her husband, whose lifehad had something to do with flight.He was quiet, the husband. Like someonewhose part in the world was done.He seemed to expectno one.He was the husband.He was like light on the leaves of night.
Black Forest
Feature Date
- July 30, 2024
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
“Black Forest” from A NIGHT IN THE COUNTRY: by Laura Newbern.
Published by Changes Press on March 1, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Laura Newbern.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Laura Newbern is the author of Love and the Eye, selected by Claudia Rankine for Kore Press. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The Threepenny Review, Poetry, and The Georgia Review, among others. The recipient of a Writer’s Award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, she grew up in Washington, D.C. and currently lives and works in Georgia.
Selected by Louise Glück as Winner of the 2023 Changes Book Prize, Laura Newbern’s second collection is a work of burning, restrained urgency that looks at loss, isolation, the passage of time—and what endures despite. Written in a town that was once home to the world’s largest asylum, these poems are studies in the dual nature of that idea: asylum, always both a protection and an exile.
“Poetry’s impossible objectives—permanence, the dream of perfection—haunt these poems. Poems about art and the making of art recur, but in the main, A Night in the Country is rooted in a recognizable human reality, less rarefied than art but sharing with art a recognition of limitation. [. . .] At a time when most are preoccupied with justice, with what can and must be changed, Laura Newbern writes about what does not change, writing not so much against current modes as apart from them. Small occasions, clear sentences. And underneath, measureless fathoms.”
—Louise Glück
“Laura Newbern’s A Night in the Country is at once direct and mysterious, a book of declarations and decrees subsumed in the language of the fable. These poems romp and turn and wander and wonder with no easy endings in sight, or as Newbern herself might say, ‘Life’s a room: outside/it two great rivers meet in sunlight…there is no help in them.’ These are exceptional poems, and a subtle song of heartbreak plays through every line.”
—Jericho Brown
“The poems in A Night in the Country contain poignant inquiries into the satisfactions that images provide, or fail to provide, in our mental and emotional lives. The poet imagines Renaissance painters at work; tries out various self-portraits with animals; resolves discrete images of daily life with an acknowledgement of the passionate distances and trade-offs involved in making art. She maintains a sort of visual staining in mind, so that the significance or resonance of a lyric moment must remain aesthetic, and not existential. In other words, the image houses the mixed feelings and unprovable intuitions that express the lyric impulse: ‘The mind goes back, the heart goes with it, the forest/whirls all around.’ Laura Newbern’s poetry is the more remarkable because it makes these instances feel at once piercing and abidingly generous.”
—Sandra Lim
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
