Night Unto Night

Book excerpt: “In this luminous companion to Day unto Day” the acclaimed poet seeks to reconcile beauty and horror, joy and mortality, the personal and the political (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Like its predecessor, Day unto Day, this new collection presents six sequences, each written in one month a year, over the course of six years. It brings together the natural and the all-too-human; red-winged blackbirds and the death of a friend; the green leaves of a maple tree and drones overseas; a February spent in Italy and the persistence of anti-immigrant rhetoric. Dissonance is a permanent state, Collins suggests, something to be occupied rather than solved. And so this collection lives in the space between these seeming contrasts—and in the space between stanzas, sequences, days, and months. These poems speak to and revisit each other, borrowing a word or a line before turning it on end.