Now It's Dark

by Peter Gizzi

A new collection of poems from one of America's most vital and imaginative poets

The poems in this brilliant follow-up to the National Book Award finalist Archeophonics , are concerned with grieving, with poetry and death, with beauty and sadness, with light. As Ben Lerner has written, "Gizzi's poetry is an example of how a poet's total tonal attention can disclose new orders of sensation and meaning. His beautiful lines are full of deft archival allusion." With litany, elegy, and prose, Gizzi continues his pursuit toward a lyric of reality. Saturated with luminous detail, these original poems possess, even in their sorrowing moments, a dizzying freedom.

Genres: Poetry, Contemporary

128 pages, Paperback

First published December 4, 2020

About the author

Educated at New York University, Brown University, and the State University of New York at Buffalo, poet Peter Gizzi is the author of several collections of poetry, including Threshold Songs (2011), The Outernationale (2007), and Artificial Heart (1998).

Gizzi uses both narrative and lyrical gestures to engage and question distance and light in his search for the unmapped. Reflecting on the question of whether his work is narrative or lyric, Gizzi stated in an interview with Poetry Daily, “I think I am a narrative poet—I’m just narrating my bewilderment as a citizen.”

(Source: Peter Gizzi @ The Poetry Foundation)

Reviews

[E. Cunningham]

A desolate majesty informs these poems, which read like some of the oldest songs. How to reconcile the emptiness of the blank, solitary present with the haunted terror and misericordia of the future and the past? What might nature know better about such reconciliations? If these poems are dark they are like the sky over Death Valley, studded with ancient and still-holding wonders, allowing no artifice, re-forming themselves relative to their own internal motion.

[Alexandra]

"I'm into that medieval
light glancing
through leaves.
The tree's arches
are a great
kingdom now.

From this end
of sadness
there's nothing
out there I want
and wonder
if there's anything
in here I need?

I'm into the way
the technology of an I
is filled with the dead.

I'm heavy with light
when the old sun
is speaking,
when I'm not sure
the day is real.

When it's hard
to be in and of it,
to be here with it
and under it"

(104-105).

This was a bewildering trip and yet I never felt all that lost. Weirdly enough, even the parts that read as alien at first, I still felt deeply. This was my first experience at reading something from Peter Gizzi and I'm left mesmerized by the way he observes the familiar in our world and how he braids it almost effortlessly with that of the spectral and intangible. These poems are dark but serene, unnerving but comforting. So many stanzas I'll be thinking on for a while, but most especially all of Coda. What a beautifully haunting poem to end with...

[adeline]

i read this fall of last year and rereading it i was struck by how much i had changed and how it felt different because of that.

the last two sections (especially, especially “nocturne” are so haunting and beautiful. everyone wants to do ghost/corpse imagery but no one gives it the spectral quality in its all its lofty (yet mundane) fullness that gizzi gives ghosts/corpses.

[salva]

drones on a little too much at times

[Ryan]

I was very touched by the last 3 stanzas of this work and I thought it was amazing

First poetry book of the year wowza in friggin May.

[Matt]

I don't think I've read a collection by Gizzi before, so I'm not sure how representative this book is of his work. But this collection, the gambit seems to be the way an individual consciousness, closely observed, interacts with a fundamentally alien other, usually nature or some outgrowth of it. Gizzi does this in a lot of pretty long poems, three or four or five pages of mostly short lines, broken into short but not regular sonnets.

It didn't move me-- I wasn't all that interested in the rise and fall of his mental processes, and I didn't find sufficient compression in the language either. Oh well.

[Jack Malik]

Not as gripping as “Fierce Elegy.”

The poems that stood out for me are the following:

- Last Poem (p. 26)
- The Face is a Political Animal (p. 44)
- Archival Light (p. 47)
- Some Joy For Morning (p. 50)
- From This End of Sadness (p. 101)

[Greg Bem]

An exceptional collection covering loss and grief as textured realities of the everyday. Each poem can be read precisely and broadly. Dark, yes, but revealing with each page turned.

[Rebecca Valley]

Peter is a master of elegy and I love his words dearly. Hearing these poems read aloud made me cry, and reading them again now I am still crying.

[Nancy]

Mesmerizing.
Nocturne: whoa.
I could read this many, many times.

[Danielle Isbell]

Vibrant. Intriguing. New.

[delmarché]

“I’m into the way / the technology of an I / is filled with the dead”

[Emma Reilly]

3.75... i really like gizzi as a person but this i think kind of dragged in the end third

[Matt]

The way he weaves between something you can explain reasonably well and something you can't and just sort of intuitively feel is really quite masterful.

[JB]

"I hate hubble photos of the sun, / it looks so fucked up. / I mean, look out man, / the world isn’t stable" (28)

"As I looked for my shoes this morning / the thought was where am I going?" (18)