“In this intimate, accomplished ode to and lamentation for ‘earth’s breath and breathless things,’ Rockman limns her large themes with compelling particulars. Environmental extremis, generational trauma, and thirst for the divine thread through the collection, accompanied by three beloved dogs, the consolations of meadows and trees, and the satisfactions and realities of long marriage. Night said is both magpie’s grief wreath and fervent prayer. This is a collection I’ll keep close for its beauty, intelligence, and witness.”
Description
Part elegy, part celebration, and full of lush descriptions of the natural world, this collection reckons with memory, aging, and the author’s Jewish-Ukrainian heritage.
From the endless star-filled skies of her chosen high-desert home to the lakes and farmland of her New England childhood to the imagined villages of her Ukrainian ancestors, award-winning poet Barbara Rockman reaches for belonging. Rockman’s Jewish heritage is woven through her searches for the ineffable, complemented by ruminations on aging, memory, and our place in the natural world. Grief sings here, tempered by grace and gratitude in this powerful collection by a poet at the height of her craft.
Reviews
“This utterly original collection rescripts the way the body holds and shapes text. Rockman builds a voracious world where love, appetite, history, faith, and generational memory weave themselves together to bind us to the very world that also breaks us. She weaves spells of protection which must break and heal and break again if they are to work. Though the ‘evidence is delicate,’ it is also incontrovertible, especially when reassembled: we are in need of new incantations where the mystery is made clear. Rockman’s collection might explode your heart if the magic of these exquisitely crafted poems weren’t already protecting it.”
“Thoughtful, elegant, and wise, Night said explores the complexities of what it means to be a twenty-first-century Jew living in the Diaspora. Throughout her latest collection, Barbara Rockman simultaneously looks back—both to the distant ancestral past and to more recent histories of displacement—as well as forward into the future. ‘Travel small,’ the book advises, but, in fact, the speaker travels very large, carrying enormous stories, rituals, traumas, and memories in her ‘overpacked valise.’ These are poems that wander from the flowering, desert landscapes of New Mexico to the rivers and fields of Ukraine and back again, crossing from generation to generation, searching for angels that ‘swarm and lean into each retold tale.’”
