Circadian (Penguin Poets)($18.00Value)

Description

A beautiful new collection from an acclaimed poet The poems in Joanna Klink’s new collection Circadian take as their guiding vision circadian clocks. Moved by the presence and withdrawal of light, these internal clocks influence rhythms of sleeping and waking: the opening and closing of flowers, the speed at which the heart pumps blood, the migratory cycles of birds. With love poems and prayers, Joanna Klink offers us patterns of glowing alertness and shared life, patterns that speak to the flickering circuit between inner and outer landscapes, that bind each beating heart to the pull of the tides. As if her very breathing were integral to landscape, Joanna Klink surrenders utterance and feeling in a place where snow sifts for hours toward the earthline, where the mineral winter makes a dull / math of cold inside the bones . Read these radiant poems as notes from a wilderness where human destiny pulses in time with vast circadians at the edge of consciousness, where silence has the eloquence of stars behind the snow / burning in ancient immanence over the field. Here is the real world , the poet insists: the holding in / of all these breaking things . -- Honor Moore In this, Joanna Klink's remarkable second book, the meditative sounding of the human pang, its need for intimate connection and its contrary need for the clarities of solitude, reminds us that precision is a cutting edge that creates dazzle. With a Dickinsonian desire for a meeting of minds and a reverence for the natural world that is tried by an awareness of mortality and ecological peril, these poems remain alert to the reparations of beauty and song, formally elegant, urgent and moving. -- Dean Young Joanna Klink has the audacity to write about the happiness of the ordinary in the language of the ecstatic. Her intensity makes the world visible. -- Linda Gregg "Klink writes love poems to nature. . . . This is beautiful writing, and it's also very American. Walt Whitman might find something to envy in the way Klink's more gentle sense of song . . .tumbles out of simple, individual acts of attention." -- Chicago Tribune Joanna Klink is the author of four books of poetry, They Are Sleeping , Circadian , Raptus , and Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy . Her poems have appeared in many anthologies, most recently The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century Poetry . She has received awards and fellowships from The Rona Jaffe Foundation, Jeannette Haien Ballard, Civitella Ranieri, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at The University of Montana.