Circadian - (Penguin Poets) by Joanna Klink (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A beautiful new collection from an acclaimed poet

The poems in Joanna Klink's new collection Circadian take as their guiding vision circadian clocks. Moved by the presence and withdrawal of light, these internal clocks influence rhythms of sleeping and waking: the opening and closing of flowers, the speed at which the heart pumps blood, the migratory cycles of birds. With love poems and prayers, Joanna Klink offers us patterns of glowing alertness and shared life, patterns that speak to the flickering circuit between inner and outer landscapes, that bind each beating heart to the pull of the tides.

Review Quotes

Praise for Circadian

"Klink writes love poems to nature...This is beautiful writing, and it's also very American. Walt Whitman might find something to envy in the way Klink's more gentle sense of song tumbles out of simple, individual acts of attention."--Chicago Tribune

"Eliot's Four Quartets comes to mind, but I think Circadian bears a closer kinship with Rilke's Duino Elegies via its gorgeous, anguished calls toward the space beyond language, or before it."--Rain Taxi Review of Books

"[Circadian] urges readers into the responsibility of attention while also warning us that once we open our eyes, we are no longer able to choose the depth in which we will be engaged; the light simply fills them, and we are forced to abandon in any measure of how much pain we might witness."--American Book Review

About the Author

Joanna Klink is the author of four books of poetry, They Are Sleeping, Circadian, Raptus, and Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies, most recently The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century Poetry. She has received awards and fellowships from The Rona Jaffe Foundation, Jeannette Haien Ballard, Civitella Ranieri, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at The University of Montana.