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The Nightfields
A WASHINGTON POST BEST POETRY COLLECTION OF 2020
A new collection from a poet whose books "are an amazing harrowing, ravishing, essential, unstoppable" (Louise Glück)
Joanna Klink's fifth book begins with poems of personal loss--a tree ripped out by a windstorm, a friendship broken off after decades, the nearing death of parents. Other poems take on the cost of not loving fully, or are written from bewilderment at the accumulation of losses and at the mercilessness of having, as one ages, to rule things out. There are elegies for friends, and a group of devotional poems. The Nightfields closes with thirty-one metaphysical poems inspired by the artist James Turrell's Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in Arizona that Turrell has been transforming into an observatory for the perception of time. The sequence unfolds as a series of revelations that begin in psychic fear and move gradually toward the possibility of infinitude and connection.
A new collection from a poet whose books "are an amazing harrowing, ravishing, essential, unstoppable" (Louise Glück)
Joanna Klink's fifth book begins with poems of personal loss--a tree ripped out by a windstorm, a friendship broken off after decades, the nearing death of parents. Other poems take on the cost of not loving fully, or are written from bewilderment at the accumulation of losses and at the mercilessness of having, as one ages, to rule things out. There are elegies for friends, and a group of devotional poems. The Nightfields closes with thirty-one metaphysical poems inspired by the artist James Turrell's Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in Arizona that Turrell has been transforming into an observatory for the perception of time. The sequence unfolds as a series of revelations that begin in psychic fear and move gradually toward the possibility of infinitude and connection.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Paperback
First published July 7, 2020
10 people are currently reading
317 people want to read
About the author
Joanna Klink
14 books52 followersJoanna Klink is an American poet. She was born in Iowa City, Iowa. She received an M.F.A. in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a Ph.D. in Humanities from Johns Hopkins University. She was the Briggs-Copeland Poet at Harvard University and for many years taught in the Creative Writing Program at The University of Montana. Her new book, THE NIGHTFIELDS, was published July 7, 2020 by Penguin Books.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
December 23, 2024
Portraits of intimacy and movement, frozen over fields and open, starless skies, deep blue and flashes of golden light. This collection feels like friendship and loss and all the quiet moments that are hard to translate to words
Personal favorites:
every small gesture towards a person is incomprehensibly alive…The most fragile thought can live inside you for months/and you carry on as if it weren’t real…Wood smoke against the screen door…A forest of water
Personal favorites:
every small gesture towards a person is incomprehensibly alive…The most fragile thought can live inside you for months/and you carry on as if it weren’t real…Wood smoke against the screen door…A forest of water
July 15, 2025
Danke Tumblr, ich küss dis Aug
aber nei honestly, vor es paar Mönet uf Tumblr uf es Gedicht us dem Buech gstosse, mit dem ich wuchelang obsessed gsi bin. Rightfully so, wie sichs usegstellt het.
Die Moment zwüsche de Moment und alli Atemzüg nach de erste Zigarette.
So het sichs bim lese ahgfühlt (ned immer, aber amigs).
Schlecht in Wort zfasse und ich müesst mer es paar stund neh zum öbbis gschieds drüber zschriebe, drum selber lese.
Ich han uf jede Fall es neus Zauberbuech gfüllt mit magische Schätz.
aber nei honestly, vor es paar Mönet uf Tumblr uf es Gedicht us dem Buech gstosse, mit dem ich wuchelang obsessed gsi bin. Rightfully so, wie sichs usegstellt het.
Die Moment zwüsche de Moment und alli Atemzüg nach de erste Zigarette.
So het sichs bim lese ahgfühlt (ned immer, aber amigs).
Schlecht in Wort zfasse und ich müesst mer es paar stund neh zum öbbis gschieds drüber zschriebe, drum selber lese.
Ich han uf jede Fall es neus Zauberbuech gfüllt mit magische Schätz.
January 30, 2021
(…) a deadness
in me
now utterly mine
Beautiful! Gorgeous! Exquisite! Not that this surprises me in the least, because I'm convinced that Joanna Klink could never write a bad poem. I still love her collections Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy and Raptus a tiny bit more, but I'm madly in love with all her words! Picking favourites is - once again - impossible, so instead I just want to recommend this book to everyone!
in me
now utterly mine
Beautiful! Gorgeous! Exquisite! Not that this surprises me in the least, because I'm convinced that Joanna Klink could never write a bad poem. I still love her collections Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy and Raptus a tiny bit more, but I'm madly in love with all her words! Picking favourites is - once again - impossible, so instead I just want to recommend this book to everyone!
June 15, 2020
thank you so much to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC! i feel like i could read this book a million times and still have it feel brand new. every line was absolutely beautiful. every poem felt intimate and expansive all at once and it felt like the settings transitioned from close knit forests to wide open skies in a matter of words. so fantastic. easily my favorite poetry book i’ve read this year!
October 21, 2023
A lovely introduction to the work of Joanna Klink. Thanks to the Washington Post for the recommendation.
Klink groups her works in a variety of ways, including a half dozen devotions and 31 brief reveries on the night sky, based on an artist's work at an Arizona observatory.
My favorite poems are On Diminishment, On Surmising, A Friendship, Crossland, Cancer (Prayer for My Father), but I highlighted many striking turns of phrases or emotional content to which I could relate in a lot of the poems. Night Sky didn't engage me as much as the other material, but I might need to spend more time with it. Reading this makes me want to go back and read more of Klink.
"the bluespun languor of an evening"
"dual winds lifting ninety years of stillness as if it were nothing
"as if it hadn't held every crow and fog, emptying night from its branches"
"I am, since you turned away from me, the most delicate book ... It is hard to shape oneself to oneself. Who are you? What is here?"
"Please. Give us birds. A light unto a world. An undistorted, ancient ornament -- some swift way out of the earth. Where the stones are laid. Where we are laid."
Klink groups her works in a variety of ways, including a half dozen devotions and 31 brief reveries on the night sky, based on an artist's work at an Arizona observatory.
My favorite poems are On Diminishment, On Surmising, A Friendship, Crossland, Cancer (Prayer for My Father), but I highlighted many striking turns of phrases or emotional content to which I could relate in a lot of the poems. Night Sky didn't engage me as much as the other material, but I might need to spend more time with it. Reading this makes me want to go back and read more of Klink.
"the bluespun languor of an evening"
"dual winds lifting ninety years of stillness as if it were nothing
"as if it hadn't held every crow and fog, emptying night from its branches"
"I am, since you turned away from me, the most delicate book ... It is hard to shape oneself to oneself. Who are you? What is here?"
"Please. Give us birds. A light unto a world. An undistorted, ancient ornament -- some swift way out of the earth. Where the stones are laid. Where we are laid."
August 30, 2020
Reading Joanna Klink’s poems require of me a clear headspace that is often hard won these days. That said, when I am in that headspace, I am always entranced by her lines. Often ethereal, they strike a deep cord.
“Most weeks I am no more than the color of the walls / in the room where we sit...”
“Each day / you get a small thing right. Each day / something forgotten or unsaid or just missed.”
“... Sounds of dishes / from a neighbor’s sink / disappear into the afternoon. / Once again I am unable to withstand / the brevity of yours, the weekend almost gone...”
“Gorgeous wager of our lives: it is still there.”
“Most weeks I am no more than the color of the walls / in the room where we sit...”
“Each day / you get a small thing right. Each day / something forgotten or unsaid or just missed.”
“... Sounds of dishes / from a neighbor’s sink / disappear into the afternoon. / Once again I am unable to withstand / the brevity of yours, the weekend almost gone...”
“Gorgeous wager of our lives: it is still there.”
Read
January 24, 2021Favorite poems in this collection include “Givens,” “Evenings and Days,” “A Friendship,” and “On Abiding.”
“Better to be awake at night in sympathy with clocks
than to wander vaguely
through days.” --From “Almanac”
“I have no measure of you
with whom I spent so many hours
I don’t even know how to tell
one part of the story” --From ”On Surmising”
“I only know life is
brisk—will take away
what one loves most.
How else would we
learn but by force” –From ”On Standing Still”
“Better to be awake at night in sympathy with clocks
than to wander vaguely
through days.” --From “Almanac”
“I have no measure of you
with whom I spent so many hours
I don’t even know how to tell
one part of the story” --From ”On Surmising”
“I only know life is
brisk—will take away
what one loves most.
How else would we
learn but by force” –From ”On Standing Still”
October 28, 2025
“It is possible to love
without purpose.
It is possible to walk
far into another
and find only
yourself. If there is a right
action of the throat,
it is to say: I tried,
I stayed a long time there.”
without purpose.
It is possible to walk
far into another
and find only
yourself. If there is a right
action of the throat,
it is to say: I tried,
I stayed a long time there.”
January 10, 2021
A masterpiece. I am moving Joanna Klink up into my contemporary American poetry pantheon.
Briefly described, the book is about loss (a painful breakup, a 90-year-old blue spruce uprooted by a windstorm, the death of her father) and looking at the night sky. That is, the book is about two of poetry's most ancient and foundational themes. So why does it seem so fresh and original?
Mainly because of Klink's always surprising language, I think. "Motors carry you, / or feet pull you forward / in cool dispersals of color." Or: "the ground doves in their murmuring feathers." Or: "Devotion is full of arrows."
Perhaps also because of her idiosyncratic spirituality, which might show up as a strange prayer:
"Please. Give us birds.
A light unto the world. An undistorted,
ancient ornament--some swift way
out of the earth.
Where the stones are laid.
Where we are laid."
Or that she would wrote a poem called "New Year" that includes the statement "it was already too late"--and then the poem (I think) turns out to be an update of that classic of belatedness, Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach."
Or just the ambition of "Night Sky," a long poem (or sequence, I'm not sure) about looking at the night sky that slowly becomes a poem about everything.
The republic may be going to hell, but our poetry remains worthwhile. It's something.
Briefly described, the book is about loss (a painful breakup, a 90-year-old blue spruce uprooted by a windstorm, the death of her father) and looking at the night sky. That is, the book is about two of poetry's most ancient and foundational themes. So why does it seem so fresh and original?
Mainly because of Klink's always surprising language, I think. "Motors carry you, / or feet pull you forward / in cool dispersals of color." Or: "the ground doves in their murmuring feathers." Or: "Devotion is full of arrows."
Perhaps also because of her idiosyncratic spirituality, which might show up as a strange prayer:
"Please. Give us birds.
A light unto the world. An undistorted,
ancient ornament--some swift way
out of the earth.
Where the stones are laid.
Where we are laid."
Or that she would wrote a poem called "New Year" that includes the statement "it was already too late"--and then the poem (I think) turns out to be an update of that classic of belatedness, Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach."
Or just the ambition of "Night Sky," a long poem (or sequence, I'm not sure) about looking at the night sky that slowly becomes a poem about everything.
The republic may be going to hell, but our poetry remains worthwhile. It's something.
January 4, 2022
“I cannot tell
what is unbearable in me
from what is opening.”
this collection makes you look inwards as much as it makes you look up and around you. the continuous connections to nature, especially the sky and the night, both ground klink’s thoughts and elevate them to a universal level. one of the best treatments of grief, pain, and forgiveness i have read in poetry thus far. the one detriment is that the symbolism and metaphors do get repetitive, and sometimes feel clichéd, but i mind it very little if the result is such an introspective and brilliantly painted landscape.
4.7
what is unbearable in me
from what is opening.”
this collection makes you look inwards as much as it makes you look up and around you. the continuous connections to nature, especially the sky and the night, both ground klink’s thoughts and elevate them to a universal level. one of the best treatments of grief, pain, and forgiveness i have read in poetry thus far. the one detriment is that the symbolism and metaphors do get repetitive, and sometimes feel clichéd, but i mind it very little if the result is such an introspective and brilliantly painted landscape.
4.7
December 29, 2021
Gorgeous. Every line had meaning and precision. The mood was a dream. Rainy, snowy, cold, comfy, contemplative. I struggle with second person, so I didn’t always love that in the latter pieces, but Klink uses a conversational/confessional voice in her poems that’s inviting and easily engaging. I’m eager to see this on the page, but I loved listening to her read her own work.
March 17, 2022
Such a beautiful book. I loved “On Surmising” and “Evenings and Days.” Her work reminds me of Gluck’s —every word feels deeply philosophic. The sense of melancholia, loss, and of being lost are ever present in this collection.
June 25, 2020
Thank god for Joanna Klink. Her poems radiate deep emotional intelligence and vigorous heart.
September 22, 2020
I’m glad I read these poems. Grief and loss are held in these poems. They poems are meant to provide comfort in times and places where people are lost and wondering around.
August 17, 2022
Not one for short stories but this was a collection of really inspiring and hard hitting stories that touched deep and left a lasting impression
December 20, 2022
3.25 stars
April 17, 2023
haunted worldlets, the moon, anguish
November 9, 2023
OH MY GOD
January 14, 2025
when i was young i wanted the giddy pain that came with love but now would give anything for understanding, one person sensing the other, and joy that rushes in for no reason.
April 10, 2025
Great book of poems - loved the last poem (Night Sky)
July 7, 2025
heartachingly beautiful. Klink's voice is delicately crafted, sensorially spellbinding, clear at heart - this is poetic restraint in its best expression/form.
November 30, 2025
So much in her work resonates deeply and she writes with such skill. Aaaaa
July 20, 2023
Rarely do I rate a poetry book as I find the task impossible, but this work has resonated with me in its beautiful prose, rhythm, and reflections on life. It is good to read or listen to and I often listen to it on repeat.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews