Dear Melanie McCabe,
The best way to describe this book might be to borrow your words.
“I remember our days, fanned before me like a deck of cards. If you could say to me now, Pick a day, any day. No matter which I choose it would be the right one.”
Night Divers is an exercise in magic. Fan the book like a deck of cards, pick a page, any page, and it’s the right one. It’s the kind of intricate writing you could read over and over again and find something new every time.
I know your book is about grief, but it doesn’t eulogize, it conjures. When the breath leaves, the body stops, but somehow you circumvent that mortal law by visiting the only place where there never was breath. In your title poem “The Night Divers,” your use of scene is so specific and otherworldly. Lingering images of sisters swimming in a chlorinated heart, sinking and persistently bringing coins from the deep end to the surface. In there they are safe, unhurried, and separated from everything but each other.
The poem is characterized by its absence of breath, in the thin space where life can’t start or end. I think maybe you have gone there again, and you have dragged up poems instead of coins this time.
This book oscillates between riding the waves of grief that follow the loss of a loved one and surrendering, sinking down into the depths to resurrect memory.
At this point, I’ve read the whole of Night Divers a few times, but “This Dog” and, “The Idea of Heaven” are the poems I return to the most.
“This Dog” contemplates the ubiquity of the dog’s bark. How the sound can ride in from an obscured yard, and invade everything from dreams to cereal. Like a widow’s keen, the enduring bark reminds us of grief. The white-noised dog bark echoes everywhere and is traced to a collarless dog, a phantom muzzle and throat. It brings up the famous Kafka quote, “All knowledge, the totality of all questions and answers, is contained in the dog.” And you exercise extreme restraint, leaving those answers off the page. The poem seems less interested in revelation and more interested in the gear-grinding processes one takes to get there. Instead of a morality or totality you leave us with the questioning line: “and never ask, though you will long to ask, if anyone else hears this dog.”
And just like that you help us listen.
These quiet moments of listening are what I love best in your work. No poem exemplifies this more than “The Idea of Heaven.”
“In those days, morning was a million miles from night.
Like soft Bazooka or taffy pulled sweet and long,
we stretched out each day until it seemed infinite.
…
Sun, fat as a Necco wafer, traces
an orange chalk line down turquoise
to melt on the tongue of the river.”
Mmm. Delicious.
Best,
Catherine Jones
