I was, you will understand, entering the kingdom of death.” But in the circular accelerations of time, the exhilarated knight bent on a heroic quest mysteriously morphs into a world-weary adult approaching the end of life: “I became / a glorious knight riding into the setting sun, and my heart / became the steed underneath me. The collection takes its title from an Arthurian tale being read by the child narrator’s brother, who has mistakenly interpreted the word “knight” for “night.” For a child, of course, such a confusion is natural, a corollary of his fantasy world and nighttime dream life. There are formal surprises in this new collection which recently won the National Book Award as well: an intricate narrative structure conflating the stories of child, knight-explorer, and artist, and the insertion of a series of abstractly metaphorical prose poems that have the feel of Kafkaesque fables. The essence of mortality that emerges is inherently paradoxical and circular in movement just as the brightness of day continually darkens into night, we are propelled forward into a future that perpetually moves us back into the past. It is not unusual that a poet entering her eighth decade should be preoccupied with the subject of mortality, but what is surprising in Louise Glück’s latest collection is the distinctive tone through which the poems are filtered, a tone that kaleidoscopically shifts by turns from innocence to disenchantment, amazement to detachment, euphoria to irony.
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