The Antigonish Review
Issue # 122
Anne Simpson
A Night-Sea Journey
A Night-sea Journey, by Michael
Alpert, Constance Hunting (2000), 76 Main St. Orono, ME, 04469,USA (US)
$14.95, plus US $3.00 for shipping.
Books that move us are few and far between,
but the ones that both challenge and inspire us are rare finds. Such a
book is Michael Alpert’s third book, A Night-sea Journey, published
in 2000 by Constance Hunting. A professor of English at the University
of Maine, Constance Hunting is herself a well-regarded poet, scholar,
editor and publisher.
Michael Alpert is the Director of the University
of Maine Press, and a visual artist as well as a writer. His first book
of poetry, Die Winterreise, named after Schubert’s song cycle,
was published by Saltworks Press in the 70s. His second book, Darkwood,
was published by Constance Hunting’s Puckerbrush Press in 1982. A Night-sea
Journey appeared after an interval of eighteen years.
The poetry in A Night-sea Journey is
as quiet and compelling as its cover, which is a black and white wraparound
photograph of a beach, mostly consisting of pebbles and sand with a band
of filmy water. The picture was taken at Herring Bay Beach, Campobello
Island, New Brunswick. There is no mention of the poet, no details about
the publisher (a little sleuthing was required to elicit more information).
The focus is entirely on the work itself, which consists of only one or
two lines per page. It is a long work: this makes for a hefty book, unusual
in an age in which poetry books are invariably slim.
Yet this book, ostensibly poetry, might be
as easily categorized as a long prose work,
or poetry that verges on both fiction and non-fiction.
It is no ordinary book. Based on a brilliant, daring idea, it is like
a sculpture, in which the space around it is just as important as the
sculpture itself. The words require this space, this silence.
As if a leaf could return to its branch, as
if all starlight could begin again. So the book begins. Not haiku, not
aphorism, this is poetry returned to its beginnings, with words opening
into all manner of possibilities. Yet the journey may be harrowing: No
rescue, no shelter, no landfall.” Here is the confrontation with both
self and other, life at the edge of the known world.
Can depth of feeling be sustained through
a long work that depends upon a single line or couple of lines per page?
On the whole, the strategy works. It is true that a reader might dip in
and out, rather than reading the book straight through, even though a
sustained reading offers singular pleasures. It might also be the case
that the emptiness of the page forces the spare lines to be extremely
good. The consequence of weak lines is that they become more noticeable.
Yet as one line succeeds another, folding into what follows, the strongest
lines remain: We own everything except thirst, which owns us. Or this:
With each breath we ask for miracles. And we are answered with the next
breath. Indeed, each line of this book is a breath answered by the next
breath.
Alpert is clearly interested in large metaphysical
questions, but they remain, throughout, beautifully elusive. Within the
text are linked ideas that have the effect of echoing and re-echoing one
another. And each brief section is marked, and indeed clocked, by Roman
numerals. Such concerns as time, love, and life (as well as the paradoxes
attending them) might be lost in the clutter of the quotidian, but here,
starkly set on the page, they are imbued with mystery.
Reading A Night-sea Journey is not
unlike watching waves break on the shore. And anyone who has done this
for any length of time will be aware of a cumulative effect that is powerful
in its very rhythm and simplicity.
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