Customer Reviews

The Red Leaves of Night

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This book was gorgeous. I immediately slid into his perception of places and relationships; his tone and language flowed well and were easy to follow, including everything from contractions in "Nocturnes & Aubades" to a faintly antiquated tone in "Troubadour." The naked body does not inhibit him, either; his descriptions mythologize the natural beauty of the nude. Also, in a contemporary sense, his choice to leave out punctuation for several poems is brave, for he does it well. I only wish I could form poems as lovely as his. Even though the title poem leads the reader "to some newly solitary / & distant home," the journey there is worth it.

I found David St John's The Red Leaves of Night to be a captivating and stimulating read - both in its thematic sophistication and elegance of language. St John shows a capacity for precise and economic use of language which results in a clarity which fully reveals the strength of his poetic imagery. This strength manifests most clearly in the many sensual metaphors which he uses to describe the human body. These wonderful images accumulate throughout the collection and their highly visual nature makes the poems come alive with images of the naked bodies which populate the text. The poems impressed me with their thematic sophistication, the clarity with which they expressed ideas, the intimacy of their detail and the honest nakedness of the subject matter. The Red Leaves of Night is a collection of immediate, passionate and powerful poetry.

These meditations on sexual intimacy, memories of love & desire, the passage of daily and historical time, color, place, and language are both devastatingly beautiful and raw in their emotion. St. John deals in abstractions, but I would not call him an abstract poet. Perhaps you could call it invention, perhaps it is metaphor or alchemy - he is toying with the line between the concrete and the abstract. _The Red Leaves of Night_ begs the question of when a detail - the color of a woman's clothing or the tune she hums - is concrete and when it becomes a mere thought, an abstraction. Ultimately, St. John suggests that concrete and abstract are two sides of the same coin - that every word and every object has the potential to be (or to signify) both, though that potential is neither neutral nor safe.

David St. John's "The Red Leaves of Night" is a must-read for all lovers of sensual, intellectual, and entertaining poetry. St. John's use of language is simply elegant while his descriptions are vivid and tangible enough to transform the text into a picture book. As he writes in the poem "Music", "It became my passion to explain everything/ With music even the randomness of starlight or death" we as readers plead for more lessons because we know he is speaking the truth! David St. John's collection is a modern example of what poetry is and what it can truly be!

St. John is one of our masters, and The Red Leaves of Night is a gift to all readers of poetry who believe in the power of language to enact desire, embody mystery, and restore wonder. The sequence of Aubades and Nocturnes is dazzling; the final section of the book is very nearly transporting.