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Night

‘Night’ relates to the specific social (and sometimes socio-political) context in which the book was written. It addresses individual reaction to current wars, the corrupting aspects of digital culture and the tension between personal responses and wider responsibilities.

There is also a research-based structural issue found in the book’s unique use of through-composition which interrogates notions of form and sequence. The collection contains sequences, but also poems that ‘belong to one another’ and poems that are related thematically though not necessarily in terms of narrative progression. The combination of these aspects extends to a first-to-last intermittent linkage which applies to word-choice, to image-cluster and to style. This technique provides a referential compass that unites the volume not just in specificity of subject, though this is a significant aspect, but also through a deliberately uneven continuity in theme and subject that brings in an almost meditative undercurrent; and, insofar as this relies for its linguistic palette on idiolect and pulse, it can register at a level below – or perhaps beyond – that of mere interpretation.

Most uniquely, perhaps, this extends to the final poem in the collection: a sustained narrative of sixty-three septets which provides not so much a summation of what has gone before, but an imaginative expansion of the narrative scope at which those earlier poems hint. The reader’s understanding of the work – their involvement with it and, more, their experience of it – is, therefore, not so much linear as spatial. It offers the reader, in effect, a different means to interpretation.

‘Night’ won the Griffin International Poetry Prize and was triple short-listed in the UK (Forward, Costa, and T.S Eliot prizes).