Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems

by Lisa Russ Spaar (Editor)

It is the rare individual who has not, at one time or another, been kept awake for hours on end―as the rest of the world, maddeningly, appears to be comfortably lost in the nocturnal world of dreams.

Here is a treasury of verse on the rich subject of insomnia―meditations by poets who have sought to describe their own moments of solitude in darkness, when the world's regular bustle of activity and distraction falls away and they are left to contemplate in silence.

Acquainted with the Night brings together Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop, Rimbaud and Sappho, Shakespeare and Shelley―the great poets of the Western literary heritage―on a theme with which each one has been acutely familiar. Lisa Russ Spaar has also unearthed ruminations on the sleepless nights of poets the world in a fascinatingly diverse anthology, she has harvested verse from Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Inuit, Vietnamese, Tamil, Yiddish, and Romanian poets, who together present an illuminating display of insomnia's extraordinary and enduring legacy in widely different cultures through the centuries.

As these exquisite poems chart a course from solitude, through anxiety, to epiphany, the reader truly learns what it means to be acquainted with the night.

Genres: Poetry, Anthologies

183 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 1999

About the author

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of many collections of poetry, including Glass Town (Red Hen Press, 1999), Blue Venus (Persea, 2004), Satin Cash (Persea, 2008), Vanitas, Rough (Persea, 2012), and Orexia (Persea, 2017). She is the editor of Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson, Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems, and All that Mighty Heart: London Poems. A collection of her essays, The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry, was published by Drunken Boat Media in 2013. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, an All University Teaching Award, an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, and the 2013-2014 Faculty Award of the Jefferson Scholars Foundation. Her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry series, Poetry, Boston Review, Blackbird, IMAGE, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Slate, Shenandoah, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other journals and quarterlies, and her commentaries and columns about poetry appear regularly or are forthcoming in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She was short-listed for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Reviewing, and has taught at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Seattle Pacific University, and the Vermont Studio Center. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. --Poetry Foundation

Reviews

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an insomniac I undertood each of these poems and loved them.

[Vikki Marshall · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a lovely little book of poetry all about insomnia. Here we are blessed with the poems of Shakespeare, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Sappho, Rimbaud, as well as poets from a full spectrum of cultures and eras. History has proven that many creative types are haunted by the madness of insomnia, perhaps most of our greatest artistic contributions come from treasured minds howling at the moon. Each of these pieces offer a different perspective of the agony of a disturbed night, some offer hope, while others wallow in the frustration of all the tossing and turning that stems from a restless mind. If nothing else this book is a universal acknowledgment that great minds suffer, now and again, from haunting nights of sleeplessness and some extraordinary creations flow from all that anguish.

[Jennifer Collins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I often avoid anthologies that bring together older works with newer ones, simply because the same poems tend to get reprinted over and over again. This book found me as a gift or I probably wouldn't have picked it up, but really, I was pleasantly surprised. The focus of the theme led the editor to choose older poems that aren't so well-known, even where the authors most certainly are, so there were few poems here that I'd read in the past. I did find it to be somewhat uneven--the poems in the first half of the book felt more various and kept me more engaged than the later part of the work, but all in all, I enjoyed wandering my way through it.

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

As one who is well acquainted with the night, I always keep this book on my nightstand. There are some real gems that anyone who has ever suffered from insomnia will appreciate.