The Good Dark

by Ryan Van Winkle

The Good Dark is the place we go to remember. The Good Dark is the place we go to take account. In his atmospheric second collection, Ryan Van Winkle charts loves won and loves lost. A lyric voice that is both familiar and strangely different leads us through the shifting forests of memory and towards a grim acknowledgement of the need to get up, to be careful, to move. The Good Dark includes poems from Van Winkle's acclaimed one-on-one poetry performance Red, Like Our Room Used to Feel (Edinburgh Fringe 2012) and cements his reputation as one of the most evocative poets writing today.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2015

About the author

Ryan Van Winkle was born in New Haven, Connecticut. His debut collection, "Tomorrow,
We Will Live Here", was published by Salt in 2010. His second collection, "The Good Dark", won the Saltire Society’s 2015 Poetry Book of the Year award.

His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and New Writing Scotland. He was awarded the Jessie Kesson fellowship at Moniack Mhor in 2018.

Reviews

[Sanjuro · Rating 2 out of 5]

Van Winkle lives in Edinburgh, where I was living at the time of reading this collection. I came to it solely based on his positive reputation as a poet, but I was fairly disappointed. There were only two poems in the entire collection I resonated with, even remotely, and by the end found myself fairly bored and hoping for a saving glimmer of creativity. Despite my boredom, I do give the book two stars for the two poems I enjoyed; "One Year the Door Will Open," and the following untitled poem.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a dark melancholy to this collection but ultimately it left me largely unmoved. However there were two or three excellent poems for which I was glad that I had read the book. There were several pieces that I felt would probably work better performed than on the page and I was interested to read on the back cover (I always read the blurb after I have read the book) that he is also a performance poet. I would be interested in hearing him read - but this was sadly not a book I loved.