Overview

New collection from National Book Award finalist Civil twilight is the astronomical term for the minutes just before sunrise and just after sunset. If one took a snapshot, it would be impossible to tell whether the light was increasing or diminishing. The poems in Civil Twilight arise in this liminal space. With luminous precision, Cynthia Huntington examines the civil twilight we live in now, unsure of whether the darkness is closing in or whether the light is about to break. Here the poet is both skeptic and seeker, for any hope worth discovering needs to withstand the facts at hand. Is everything getting worse, or are things about to improve? Or is this the way things have always been, both hopeful and terrifying, and it is our questions that need to change? In part one, the speaker strives for balance by maintaining light and warmth in a cold season. In part two, American scenes of construction and destruction are set beside moments from history: Rome, the British Empire, and American immigration. Part three enfolds questions of history and power within winter scenes and the artist’s imagination. In part four, the speaker looks back and admits answers remain elusive, yet points to the new ways of thinking and feeling about survival that have resulted from the work. And here, the half-light shifts. In a world teetering on the edge of collapse, Civil Twilight wrestles hard-won hope from disquiet, coming to rest in what is.

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9780809339303

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Reviews

Praise for Heavenly Bodies “Cynthia Huntington’s Heavenly Bodies is a fearless and exacting exploration of illness, addiction, abuse, and the waning of American idealism. These poems are unblinking in the face of dark subject matter, and surprising in their capacity for hope, for grace. Huntington’s speakers are as vast and compassionate—as empathetic and multitudinous—as Whitman’s, and they sing of the beauty and seductive brutality of survival in a world perpetually ‘alight with new dangers.’”—Judges Citation, National Book Foundation “Huntington, who can tune a lyric any way she likes, has written exquisite poems, some of which turn tragedy into transcendence...But in this book, we suspect that Huntington is tired of rapture and redemption, and that her real subject is disobedience. Her poems in Heavenly Bodies resist transcendent turns just to please the reader, offering instead the body of the poem as it is, without lipstick or peignoir.”—Julia Shipley, Seven Days Praise for Terra Nova “This is a magnificent work, focused on the history of an all but sea-surrounded town. The poet [tells] stories through many voices, from the elevated language of creation myth and prophetic rebuke, to vivid, realistic barroom scenes, hapless and violent, mediated through a voice of personal account and self-accounting. . . . It is one poem with many poems (some of them in prose) carried through the passionate singing rhythm of these voices, becoming the one grand poem that is the book.”—David Ferry, author, Bewilderment, and winner, National Book Award in Poetry “Provincetown is the locus of this ambitious, wide-ranging, and archetypal collection, which takes up various histories of migration and exile and reimagines them for our time. Terra Nova has the feeling of a biblical prophecy, a lost book that has washed up from the sea.”—Edward Hirsch, author, Gabriel: A Poem

"Praise for Heavenly Bodies ""Cynthia Huntington's Heavenly Bodies is a fearless and exacting exploration of illness, addiction, abuse, and the waning of American idealism. These poems are unblinking in the face of dark subject matter, and surprising in their capacity for hope, for grace. Huntington's speakers are as vast and compassionate--as empathetic and multitudinous--as Whitman's, and they sing of the beauty and seductive brutality of survival in a world perpetually 'alight with new dangers.'""--Judges Citation, National Book Foundation ""Huntington, who can tune a lyric any way she likes, has written exquisite poems, some of which turn tragedy into transcendence...But in this book, we suspect that Huntington is tired of rapture and redemption, and that her real subject is disobedience. Her poems in Heavenly Bodies resist transcendent turns just to please the reader, offering instead the body of the poem as it is, without lipstick or peignoir.""--Julia Shipley, Seven Days Praise for Terra Nova ""This is a magnificent work, focused on the history of an all but sea-surrounded town. The poet [tells] stories through many voices, from the elevated language of creation myth and prophetic rebuke, to vivid, realistic barroom scenes, hapless and violent, mediated through a voice of personal account and self-accounting. . . . It is one poem with many poems (some of them in prose) carried through the passionate singing rhythm of these voices, becoming the one grand poem that is the book.""--David Ferry, author, Bewilderment, and winner, National Book Award in Poetry ""Provincetown is the locus of this ambitious, wide-ranging, and archetypal collection, which takes up various histories of migration and exile and reimagines them for our time. Terra Nova has the feeling of a biblical prophecy, a lost book that has washed up from the sea.""--Edward Hirsch, author, Gabriel: A Poem"

Author Information

Cynthia Huntington is the author of several collections of poetry, including Terra Nova; Heavenly Bodies, which was nominated for a National Book Award; Levis Prize-winner The Radiant; We Have Gone to the Beach, which won the Beatrice Hawley Award and the Jane Kenyon Award; and The Fish-Wife; and the nonfiction prose volume The Salt House. Huntington is an emeritus professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College, a former Guggenheim Fellow, a former poet laureate of New Hampshire, and a two-time National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Poetry.  

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