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Night Vision: Poems
Because we see with history,
it is difficult to see through it. And yet we must
or we become it, become nothing else but history.
It is this challenge, laid down in the powerful title poem of this collection, which Kendel Hippolyte takes up in Night Vision. And the history that Hippolyte penetrates is a history of the change overtaking the island of St. Lucia. As town becomes city and city spreads like a cancer, the poet's searching verse finds among the waste of humanity, nature, and culture a microcosm of the transforming Caribbean-from tradition, community, rooted identity, to social fragmentation, isolation, uncertainty. And yet, in the personal, away from the daytime public glare, Night Vision also finds the possibility of renewal. Engaging society and self, the poet's dialogue is conducted in a range of poetic voices and styles-the traditional forms of sonnet, villanelle, triolet, echo poem, as well as dramatic monologues in Caribbean English idioms and rhythms of speech; poems written to the metrics of blues and rap alongside free verse poems that expand in long-breath incantatory lines and contract in miniaturist forms as concise as graffiti. The joyful linguistic energy of the poems is perhaps what makes them, and us, look beyond the glaring reality they contemplate to a more hopeful, if nighttime, vision.
it is difficult to see through it. And yet we must
or we become it, become nothing else but history.
It is this challenge, laid down in the powerful title poem of this collection, which Kendel Hippolyte takes up in Night Vision. And the history that Hippolyte penetrates is a history of the change overtaking the island of St. Lucia. As town becomes city and city spreads like a cancer, the poet's searching verse finds among the waste of humanity, nature, and culture a microcosm of the transforming Caribbean-from tradition, community, rooted identity, to social fragmentation, isolation, uncertainty. And yet, in the personal, away from the daytime public glare, Night Vision also finds the possibility of renewal. Engaging society and self, the poet's dialogue is conducted in a range of poetic voices and styles-the traditional forms of sonnet, villanelle, triolet, echo poem, as well as dramatic monologues in Caribbean English idioms and rhythms of speech; poems written to the metrics of blues and rap alongside free verse poems that expand in long-breath incantatory lines and contract in miniaturist forms as concise as graffiti. The joyful linguistic energy of the poems is perhaps what makes them, and us, look beyond the glaring reality they contemplate to a more hopeful, if nighttime, vision.
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
First published January 4, 2006
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March 1, 2016
There is something ultimately so humanizing, so beautifully ordinary in its utter lack of contrivance, about one of this book's best poems being "Circle of Joy", dedicated to the poet's first drama students. The tone is familiar and familial, the address to young thespians urgent and also unmuddied by anything other than honest, full regard. You feel the poet so keenly when he tries to describe what his charges gave him, what he found himself giving in turn -- what we all hope we have in us to do, even when we're acquainted with new levels of personal emptiness:
"Something to do with just how naturally you took for granted
that the work must be done well, something about how much you wanted
to improve what you were doing, though there was no reward, no prize
beyond the excellence of doing it well. Believe me, that is becoming rare.
So rare that, before these last two years, I’d started to forget
that people could do difficult things through joy."
This collection, in its finest moments, does difficult things through that joy.
"Something to do with just how naturally you took for granted
that the work must be done well, something about how much you wanted
to improve what you were doing, though there was no reward, no prize
beyond the excellence of doing it well. Believe me, that is becoming rare.
So rare that, before these last two years, I’d started to forget
that people could do difficult things through joy."
This collection, in its finest moments, does difficult things through that joy.
Displaying 1 of 1 review