Incantations: Deathwatch - Wings - Revelations

By Steven Nightingale

Poetry - Paperback

OUT NOW!

From the author of: GRANADA: A POMEGRANATE IN THE HAND OF GOD (2016)

The haiku is an intense, concentrated form, ideal for portraying the atrocious darkness of our times, and also the exaltations of life possible when love and understanding come into unity. In this book of poems, which moves the haiku form towards incantation, we are shown the ferocity of danger before us; and also a way forward—a jailbreak, a healing, the recognition of a place of safety. It’s where we know a concord of souls, erotic communion, raw blessing, and rebellion.

Steven Nightingale lives in Fez, Morocco. He writes novels, sonnets, long essays on cities, lyrical meditations on nature, haiku, and short stories. His interests include the medieval art of Italy, Islamic tile work and ceramics, the wilderness of the American West, astronomy, the gray whale, venture capital, the quantitative arts, and Emily Dickinson, whom he loves.

Steve Nightingale is a literary and intellectual nonpareil and this collection of linked haiku sequence poems stands as further proof of the fact. The love poems are among the finest in that genre of this generation. I feel envious of anyone reading Nightingale’s work for the first time: what a wonderful experience awaits. This is a genuine bravo y ole’ tome. - David Lee, Rusty Barbed Wire: Selected Poems

Steven Nightingale’s astonishing collection of haiku in Fogbank and Fox-call might well be woven as much from clouds and birdsong as it is from words of the English language. The poems you will encounter here are both as devastating as grenades and as arresting as starlit nights in the wilderness. Reading these poems—from the hand of a poet with a hard-won, yet abiding affection for the world—one is in the presence of a text both sacred and necessary. - Richard J. Nevle, author of The Paradise Notebooks: Ninety Miles across the Sierra Nevada

By turns graceful and searing, Steven Nightingale’s luminous poems explore and expand the astonishing perceptual range enabled by the haiku. In his brilliant contemporary engagement with this ancient form, Nightingale shows how attention and precision offer a passageway into a vast, unmapped territory of emotion and imagination. The indelible imagery and incantatory beauty of Fogbank and Fox-call make it a spectacular literary achievement. - Michael P. Branch, author of Raising Wild and On the Trail of the Jackalope

I’m astonished by these poems, each one like a vital moment captured in amber. But together! Together, these small, intense glimpses of truth touch the grand story of humanity at our worst and best. With equal parts precision and sensuality, Steven Nightingale braids three strands of opposition: the global and the deeply personal, the world of metaphor and the world of fact, the abominable and the idyll. I devoured Fogbank and Fox-call in a single sitting, even as I told myself savor, savor. - Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of All the Honey and Hush

Trying to name the anguish in this book is better left to angels.  Breathe these haiku in.  Like slow rain, they saturate with feral feeling, evoke what the mind of love might have done to finally let healing begin.  - Shaun T. Griffin, author of Bathing In The River of Ashes

We live by threes, poet Steven Nightingale declares, and here, in earth-shaking words and exquisitely drawn images, he sets out to show us how, and why. His lines fall into familiar patterns. Strings of triplets share thoughts, which evolve into words, which expand into figures new and unexpected. I’ve seen nothing like this, a tour de force that is at once exhilarating and dire--Haikus of coolness and liberation, which, as Nightingale puts it, we can come to and dwell within. - Robert Leonard Reid, author of Because It is So Beautiful (Counterpoint)