Circadian

by Joanna Klink

A beautiful new collection from an acclaimed poet

The poems in Joanna Klink's passionate 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 wintry 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.

Genres: Poetry, 21st Century

67 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Joanna 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.

Reviews

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems in this collection are astoundingly beautiful. From the first line to the last, their quiet, precise movement travels in the overlap of personal relationships and the natural world. In one breath, Klink will give you an image that has you flying, and in the next she will have you believe you have actually been swimming all along. Whether writing about loneliness, suicide, mental illness, marriage, or migration, she is constantly asking what is enough to keep things always beginning.

Her syntax is so subtly deliberate, you can actually feel (although just barely) something moving around amongst the words. She pushes language very gently across thresholds, and in this way I would say she is experimental - not as, say, the "language poets" are experimental, but in a way that is fresh and takes responsibility for itself. She pushes the bounds of meaning without sacrificing meaning. Beautiful. Hushed. A little bit disorienting, but in the way that waking from a deep sleep is disorienting - it brings with it some clarity, some memory of a place that was still and not still.

I think she is such a lovely and unique voice, and I find it hard to really compare her to other poets. But is you like Mary Oliver, Gregory Orr, Emily Dickinson, W. S. Merwin, or Elizabeth Bishop, I think you might find yourself quite in love with these poems.

[Margaryta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Klink's poems are meditative and attentive, if a little meandering, making me have to consciously flip back to the beginning of the poem and reread in order to grasp everything instead of just hanging on to whatever line I'm currently reading. Maybe I'll get more into it after another reading.

[Anna George · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marvelous syntactical inventions, pleasurable associative movement. She's been reading Brigit Pegeen Kelley (and like Kelley can veer along the edges of preciousness) but also Laura Jensen (_Bad Boats_).

[Angela · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ugh. So much wasted potential. The words in these poems are beautiful and Klink uses a ton of figurative language—but there's such thing as too much of a good thing, which is the case with most of the poems in Circadian. The poems are about nature, the seasons, snow, stars, rivers and seas. I got distracted easily while reading, mainly due to Klink's weird aversion to periods; after three, four, or ten stanzas without pause, my brain started turning to mush as so many ideas jumbled together. Klink likes to use similes and metaphors in succession, so that by the time you've finished the sentence you can barely remember the original subject of the poem. I also find her a little repetitive, which is something I'm picky about as I prefer poets who use economy of words well. For example:

"And the pale blue beryl waters, the emeralds/and other beryls, the natural blue stones below the supple//waterstones, and the evanescence of sea through light/that separates all the colors of daylight from their mineral luster//the new grasses on the beaches, the plusher greens they portend—/even the gray-and-speckled-greens of human eyes"
(From "Blue Ice")

Poems that I liked:
"Sea Levels," "Porch in Snow," "Hourglass" (the first half, anyways...)

=2.5/28 (8.9%) poems that I liked.

[Stewart Lindstrom · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is everything I look for in a poetry collection. Elegant and full of mystery, Klink's evocations of the natural world never cease to amaze and move. At all times elusive, but never needlessly cryptic, Klink finds a golden mean between illuminating and hiding her meanings in poetry.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous.

[Naomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Splendid poems requiring the reader to pause and contemplate that stillness, to sit back and marvel, to engage the complexity of every day with our whole selves. These are not the attentive poems that invite joyful reverie, but a quieter and keener way of awakening and making sense of our lives.

[17CECO]

Had this kicking around for years finally gave it a read. 2008 me would have appreciated the delicacy of the poems, how they leave airy silences between the landscape and self. 2016 me had a lot of trouble with these silences.

[Ella Frances · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this today beside the Christmas tree which glistens gently in front of the window. Joanna continues to delight. In love with every one of these moodscapes. She is one of the most intriguing and precise poets and her writing could not have come at a better time.

[William Stobb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely, elegaic, eco-oriented poems, blurring boundaries between self & world, making beauty happen in those new spaces.

[!Tæmbuŝu]

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