Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems Book

It is the rare individual who has not, at one time or another, been kept awake for hours on end -as the rest of the world, maddeningly, appears to be comfortably lost in the nocturnal world of dreams. Here is a treasury of verse on the rich subject of insomnia -meditations by poets who have sought to describe their own moments of solitude in darkness, when the world´s regular bustle of activity and distraction falls away and they are left to contemplate in silence. brings together Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop, Rimbaud and Sappho, Shakespeare and Shelley -the great poets of the Western literary heritage -on a theme with which each one has been acutely familiar. Lisa Russ Spaar has also unearthed ruminations on the sleepless nights of poets the world over: in a fascinatingly diverse anthology, she has harvested verse from Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Inuit, Vietnamese, Tamil, Yiddish, and Romanian poets, who together present an illuminating display of insomnia´s extraordinary and enduring legacy in widely different cultures through the centuries. As these exquisite poems chart a course from solitude, through anxiety, to epiphany, the reader truly learns what it means to be acquainted with the night.Read More