Night Watch

From the award-winning poet at the height of his career, a book of personal and American experiences, both beautiful and troubling, touching on the generative cycle of loss and renewal

Following on his exquisite Stones, Kevin Young’s new collection, written over the span of sixteen years, shapes stories of loss and legacy, inspired in part by other lives. After starting in the bayous of his Louisiana, Young journeys to further states of mind in “All Souls,” spotting “The whale / who finds the shore // & our poor prayers.” Another central sequence, “The Two-Headed Nightingale,” is spoken by Millie-Christine McCoy, the famous conjoined African American “Carolina Twins.” Born into enslavement, stolen and then displayed by PT Barnum and others, the twins later toured the world as free women, their alto and soprano voices harmonizing their own way. Young’s poem explores their evolving philosophical selfhood and pluralities: “As one we sang, /we spake— / She was the body / I the soul / Without one / Perishes the whole.”

In “Darkling,” a cycle of poems inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, Young expands and embroiders the circles of Hell, drawing a cosmology of both loneliness and accompaniment, where “the dead don’t know / what to do / with themselves.” Young writes of grief and hope as familiar yet surprising states: “It’s like a language, / loss—” he writes, “learnt only / by living—there—“. Evoking the history of poetry, from the darkling thrush to the darkling plain, Young is defiant and playful. When he goes, he warns, don't sing “Amazing Grace”—not that “National / Anthem of Suffering.” No, he suggests, “When I Fly Away, / Don't dare hold no vigil . . . Just burn the whole / Town on down.”

This collection will stand as one of Young’s best—his voice shaping sorrow with music, humor, and wit.