Nightbook
Poetry | Soft cover | 70 pages
“Writing these poems sometimes felt like painting en plein air, night after night, in different kinds of weather and various moods, the repetition and differences in perception bringing to mind my love for Monet’s series of paintings of haystacks.
“At other times, writing these poems felt like the Zen practice of painting a circle (ensō) with a single brush stroke — the emptiness and fullness, simplicity and mystery, stillness and motion of the night.”
Steve Matanle
Steve Matanle teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts at the University of Baltimore.
“I’m rereading Nightbook tonight. I love this little book. It reads to me like a nocturnal sestina – night stars moon heart angels trees wind light; these words reappearing but at irregular intervals, since at nighttime everything takes on a different shape, proportions change and the distances between things, as these poems show. (The Hebrew word for evening is ‘merging.’)”
Hal Grinberg, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
“To truly see — as Matanle well knows — is to still one’s own heart and let the world come close, in all its tender, frightening, sensual guises.”
Lia Purpura, AuTHOR OF ON LOOKING AND KING BABY
“Steve Matanle invites his readers to explore those night voices that point to the mysterious complexities of our lives. One leaves these poems more aware of how ephmeral it all is, how, even weighted down by the love of the stone white moon, the machinery of life, like the night itself, is fragile — shimmering in the splendor of its own solitude.”
Michael s. Glaser, former poet Laureate of Maryland, author of Disrupting Consensus
5 a.m. The world
like a table at a séance.
The fog
silhouettes the trees,
haloes
the sleepwalkers
returning
from their journeys.
— XXXV
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