This is a book of light and darkness, tragedy and triumph
Night Garden
Poetry by David Stankiewicz
6 x 9 paperback; 90 pages
ISBN:979-8-9865052-9-9; 19.00
Available now
Praise for Night Garden
Early in his luminous Night Garden, David Stankiewicz suggests that love and longing will be his subject, and what a graceful and rich exploration these poems are. With coffee, pen and notebook, with Augustine and Coltrane, on a riverbank, in a museum with his good eyes, he carries us into our own deep longings—for the sacred, for love, for what has been lost—and for the present moment to be fully realized and overflowing, which is what these poems achieve. Like the fisherman he is, Stankiewicz casts lines into the depths and brings up for us “the bright throbbing thing.” Through their attention to lived experience and language, these poems take us from various outskirts into the heart where things started don’t end, but “somehow go on being born.” These are poems that sing us into transformation through intelligence, deep spiritual insight, and the sheer beauty of his language.
—Betsy Sholl, author of As If a Song Could Save You
In Night Garden, David Stankiewicz explores rich histories of love and loss, memory and celebration. The poems are at once mythic and deeply personal, and their strength lies in the poet’s ability to investigate the deepest questions of our shared condition with fiery precision. We follow the speaker through grief and growth, youthful love affairs, and quiet moments of ordinary grace. The images burn with clarity, smolder and split, opening new channels of vision where we recognize ourselves in reflection. This is a book of light and darkness, tragedy and triumph. It’s a book for friends and lovers, parents and children, for anyone who’s ever considered the complexities of existence. Night Garden is a book for all of us.
— Mike Bove, author of EYE
David Stankiewicz opens his impressive Night Garden with an epigraph from Simone Weil that urges us to begin with “time and beauty.” Time enters these graceful poems through well-explored narratives of personal history, and Stankiewicz’s lyric gifts release music, emotion, and yes, beauty. This book enacts a spiritual search that evokes both the dry days of exile (see the marvelous “Mr. Cogito’s Despair”) and the nights in the garden that seem to step from a vision (the title poem and “Pearl of my Midnight, My Dawn” are fine examples). Stankiewicz’s poems are firmly rooted in this world, but he also has one foot in the transcendent; caught up in the glow of his words, it’s easy for readers to agree when he asks, “could it be we are that close we are that close to Paradise.” Passionate, charged with love, and beautifully made, this is poetry of a very high order.
—Theodore Deppe, author of Impossible Blackbird
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