Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems

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 over: 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 023111544X
• ISBN13: 9780231115445
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.9" x 6.8"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Brilliant

I first saw this book in my university bookstore. I was tempted, but didn't shell out the money at first. Approximately a month later, dealing with an inability to sleep soundly, I bought the book as an experiment. For every time I woke up in the night, I would read one poem. I am now, approximately one month later, halfway through the book and enjoying it immensely. Every poem is either an old acknowledged classic or completely new to me. The range of poems on the same topic, but varying so far afield in all other respects, is amazing. If Spaar complies any more anthologies in the future, she has a ready customer waiting.