Never Night

by Derick Burleson

Poetry. "Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?" a traveler writes in a notebook at the end of Elizabeth Bishop's "Questions of Travel." The poems in NEVER NIGHT ask the same question as... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0971267650
• ISBN13: 9780971267657
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: Marick Press
• Length: 72 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.9" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Never Night So Brightly Written

I'm not sure anymore, I can't quite remember: have I read poetry before? Have I? This feels like a first love, after all, a discovery, a loss of guarded chastity, to wade deep into something as yet unseen and unknown and even now, somehow, unknowable. And yet I recognize this voice as almost my own, that is, not the words, but the voice that we all keep inside, deep inside, and allow others to hear perhaps only once in a lifetime. Derick Burleson stands like a dot on the satellite screen, nearly too tiny to see, but the satellite lens zooms in, and we see, we see, for the first time, we see what we have been trying to see all along. Such strange juxtapositions, Burleson writes. His poetry is all contrast and light against shadow, miniscule against gargantuan, silence against thunderous noise. So much of the effect is like looking through an immense telescope, from either end--at one moment spotting that tiny dot of a man, standing on a cliff, and then moving to the other end of the telescope, to gaze out into the infinite, the eternal, the ever and ever. It is almost dizzying, yet we recognize it as the gaze of an open-eyed man. Burleson sees what we all see, or are willingly blind to, or cannot bear to see: that we are here for only a moment, that we are meaningless in the very same instant that we are nearly godlike with meaning. Remembering the wild beauty of Alaska when I was too long ago there, I wonder if it is this kind of wild beauty that can produce such a poet, such poetry. Even the title poem, "Never Night," captures what can't be held: You'd like it here where it's never night, where the sun circles, rather, until it ends up where it started from, east or west, rises, sinks but doesn't ever set, where in the summer you never need to sleep and all day and all night the sky is a series of blues you've seen only once before, blues van Gogh painted at the end. Burleson's poems dig into loam and earth, beginning as a child just learning to separate from his mother, on all fours in the garden, even as he sinks into earth and joins his other mother--Mother Earth. He notes nature--"sand glittering alive with flecks of mica" and "the sun wanted to eat us all with joy"--but he also observes the daily grit of construction crews and Main Street as it floats away in a surreal flood, his father still seated at the floating kitchen table and watching the weather on the television set. He notes that "glass is a slow liquid" and how our own nature calls us to often break things down in order to see them built up again, or at least to see what's inside, to understand a core value, even if it means destruction, or death, in the process. How precarious is life, yes, but how intense is our ability to love and live and survive and go on yet again. In the poem "Late Valentines," Burleson writes of such a profound and yet everyday love (and I dare anyone to find a woman who would not lay down all to receive such a Valentine): If this were the last r

Beautiful and moving

Burleson's poetry is startling beautiful and always moving. He takes his subject matter from his life in Alaska, from his relationship with his young daughter, even from popular culture (look for the Star Trek sonnet). He is a poet to watch.