Possession and loss, rapture and despair: David St. John's narrator remains unflinchingly aware that the trajectory between these two states is brief. Like a modern Dante's Virgil, he guides us through a mosaic of experiences, each more intense and illuminating than the one before. Once our journey commences, its central purpose soon becomes clear: to limn the vast architecture of erotic desire and communion.
Indeed, it is on the sexual landscape that St. John's most wrenching and primordial dramas are enacted. Sexual communion--with its potential for the dissolution of all spiritual and physical boundaries between two formerly separate beings--provides the leitmotiv of compelling, at times almost unbearable, tension throughout The Red Leaves of Night. And it is in its recognition of, even insistence on, the necessary evanescence of such communion that this collection finds its breathtaking elegiac power.
The Red Leaves of Night is replete with those strengths that have always distinguished David St. John's writing: the adroit and original imagistic fluidity, the penetrating heart and eye. But its publication also represents the emergence of a new St. John--a poet of exceptional authority and confidence, of earned insight; a writer who exists in sharp contrast to those for whom, as his narrator succinctly observes, "pleasure is terror." The Red Leaves of Night we meet that most courageous of modern men: one who grasps the dangers inherent in ecstasy and, even so, cannot turn away.
