In the Night Field - by Cameron McGill (Paperback)

About the Book

Cameron McGill's debut collection of poetry, In the Night Field, spotlights the effects of memory: its startling artistry, varied discontents, and casual fallibility.

Book Synopsis

Poetry. Cameron McGill's debut collection of poetry; IN THE NIGHT FIELD; spotlights the effects of memory: its startling artistry; varied discontents; and casual fallibility. These poems chart the complex relationship between mental health and place; the difficult paths home can be lonely and circuitous; the emotional coordinates we map along the way a reminder of those intimate regions that hold and haunt us. These can be isolating passages; but are just as often fertile: I walk further each day toward the strange / austerity my heart makes of reason. Between the attentive; persistent self and the longed-for; absent other arises a fragmented conversation; an exchange that's in a constant state of arrival. As McGill shows us; memories are a corrective; carrying back to us occasions for instruction; reconciliation; or in those astonishing flashes of clarity; what again hopes to be loved.

Review Quotes

"Cameron McGill's poems are all fire and surprise, sadness and forgiveness. In the Night Field, his brilliant debut, is a book about home inasmuch as anyone who makes a nomad of himself understands, "I'm less the buildings I used to live in/& more the strangers passing in their windows-." McGill is a poet of the declarative mode, and he declares the surreal in ways that make most dangerous of passions completely appropriate. I want to say more about how well these poems make use of timing such that they come off as pure song, but as I write, I'm realizing, I could never say enough about the beauty of this work." -Jericho Brown

"McGill shows us through his dark field: "I know myself by the things that scare me" with precise coordinates, pointing out the brightness: "gushing stars, snow on silos, heat lightning, a slingshot moon" he sees along the way. McGill skillfully navigates the mysteries of relationship, memory, and regret as the best poets do." -Dorianne Laux

"Cameron McGill's road-wise poems hopscotch from the Great Plains to the west of Ireland to compass points of somber interiority, reminding us, with their bottomless compassion for common lives, that witness is a form of tribute. Wright, Hugo, Roethke, those American masters of things that "open to darkness," would surely welcome In the Night Field into their pantheon. It's been a long time since I have heard the "god of small thunder" echo so powerfully in a collection. What a pleasure to have that music with us once more." -Campbell McGrath

"Cameron McGill is astonished by life, and by experience both vast and minute. His relationship to the language with which he expresses this astonishment is ecstatic and overflows with metaphorical delight. His poems are wonderfully full, energetic, and ardent." -Vijay Seshadri