Night Errands is a long overdue anthology, comprising personal essays and accompanying poems by over two dozen contemporary American poets. It is the first collection to focus specifically on the messages the subconscious sends nightly to poets, and the ways such communications affect their work. The book is based on the premise that dreams and poetry are intimately related and, in fact, parallel languages. Both rely on compression, juxtaposition, deep imagery, and ambiguity to create a charged atmosphere and unearth buried truths.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
In Night Errands, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, and 23 other poets ponder the relationship between dreams and poetry. Some claim to have dreamt poems in their entirety. Nicholas Christopher tells of a poem he wrote after he came upon its title in a dream. Others don't remember their dreams at all but enter a dreamlike state to work through their poems. And still others, such as Laurel Blossom, explore the similarities between dreams and poems. The most common thread here, though, concerns the ways in which poets use poemmaking as a way to nail down, make sense of, or complete those dreams that slip away as one awakens. "All day," writes Patricia Traxler (Forbidden Words) in one of the book's most evocative pieces, "you remain in the sway of this unremembered dream, at times believing you're about to retrieve it intact from the bog, but always it stays beyond reach." Traxler revels in the elusive dream that would likely frustrate the rest of us. "I know it means I've been given the seed of another poem, and that in the coming days and nights my job will be to tend it and coax it into being. Sometimes I succeed." --Jane Steinberg
From Library Journal
This engaging volume of over two dozen mostly original essays focuses on how the subconscious affects the poetry of contemporary American poets. Townley (executive director, The Writer's Place, Kansas City, MO) proposes that dreams and poetry are parallel languages: both rely heavily on the thoughts of the subconscious mind and on symbolic imagery, and "both employ compression and startling imagery and proceed by leaps rather than conventional logic." Each essay, written by poets such as Joyce Carol Oates, David Ignatow, and Laurel Blossom, explores how dreams and the subconscious influence each author's work, and each includes pertinent poetry samples and a photograph of the poet. The poets subscribe to a variety of styles, schools, and aesthetic sensibilities, and the collection represents a wide age range as well as an equal division of gender. Highly recommended for all public and academic libraries.?Kim Woodbridge, "The Scientist," Philadelphia
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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