Night Unto Night by Martha Collins (review)

Martha Collins' elegiac book Night Unto Night consists of six separate parts or what I might call cantos. Each canto is subtitled and spread over six separate months and years in Collins' life, from 2010 to 2015. Furthermore, each canto reflects the emotional landscape, domestic circumstances, and political upheavals of those discrete dates, and the entire work is further subdivided into a series of short numbered stanzas. At root of Collins' work is a remarkable blend of the pastoral lyric with the fragmentary narrative impulses of contemporary American poetry. Her style in this collection is strongly reminiscent of Dickinson, whose short hymnal lyrics embraced the "common meter" of her youthful church-going days and the lyric beauty of the biblical psalms, all grafted to an idiosyncratic vocabulary and syntax. Dickinson's poems dwelled heavily on themes of death and immortality. In simple measured lines Dickinson struggled with her faith or doubt thereof. She observed the natural world and its transcendent qualities and seemed to pit it against the smallness and brevity of her own existence.

Collins merges her strong socio-political and ethical conscience with love of the lyric, exhibiting an inherently Keatsian vision throughout, one reflective of the transient beauty of the natural world. This lyricism is evident in just an excerpt from one section of the longer canto "Out of Doors":

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Water pinks, blues, geesestretch, ducks stir, green heronrises, slow, up to the dock—

at last month's great blue, wingsover me, in the water, came

down, like the come-down Dove

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Mourning dove in the morning,geese, gulls working all day—

until sun, gold through silveredclouds, through rose, rests

for a moment, then slipsinto the slot between water and sky

These two stanzas are parsed into tercets, couplets and monostich, but on the page we see how Collins plays with various line combinations and breaks up her stanza by nonconventional spacing. All the stanzas, however, conform to a uniform five, six or seven-line length. Besides these formal considerations, Collins uses a highly elevated aesthetic diction, one classically rooted in the contemplation of living nature. In this regard Wordsworth comes to mind, as well as Louise Glück, W. S. Merwin, and Jane Kenyon. I am also aware that Collins has done many fine translations of Vietnamese poetry into English and shares knowledge of Asian cultures. Perhaps this vivid attention to the natural world and the lyric is influenced by this work. The lovely imagistic distillation of haiku or the delicate scroll paintings of China illuminate her poems. Also palpable is Collins' tranquility and serenity with its turn toward philosophic and metaphysical inquiry, which reminded me of Wallace Stevens, a poet whom Collins greatly admired, especially in his exquisite poem "Sunday Morning."

There is a danger, of course, in the use of so highly an aestheticized poetic vision, and in a style, which draws so heavily from the language of the King James Bible, from the psalms and the sacred texts; however, like Muriel Rukeyser, that great activist poet who addressed equality, feminism, social injustice and Judaism, Collins includes in her verse the troubling complexities of political injustice and social conflict, be it global warming, the inhumane treatment of immigrants, racial injustice in the struggle of Black Lives Matter, or the incessant brutality of prolonged American wars in the Middle East. Drone attacks, targeted carpet-bombing, and mounting civilian fatalities—these realities disturb and interrupt her lyrics. This was most evidenced in her "Drawn In" canto, written in Sienna, Italy, where comparisons are discerned between the high artistry of Siennese works and history and the turmoil of the present era.

Alberta Turner wrote of Rukeyser in her Dictionary of Literary Biography that she was devoted to the personal as well as to the political in her poetry, as I believe Collins is. In the canto "Broken Open" Collins writes:

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High above the herring hiding        their silver, gulls

          circled, shrieked,laboring like, but not—

        our drones our extended          hungers for the kill

13

Planes named...