Reviewed by C.L. Toups

Kristina Marie Darling’s latest poetry collection, Night Songs, reminds readers of what they have always known inherently—that music is the universal language. The poems here pulsate, and the harmony of their phrasing underscores the ways in which music moves us, lives inside us, radiates from us, and connects us. Everything is sound, even the silences. With sublime technical mastery and lyrical astuteness, Darling devises the basic notes of her linguistic scale of images: night, cello, teeth, moon, bird (canaries, in particular) harp, dust, clock, blue, window, hall, curtains—all arranged and rearranged in prose poem compositions that strike just the right chord.

Some of the most striking images are those in which light personifies music’s radiant quality: the luminous cuff links and uncanny whiteness of a cellist’s shirt, a throat likened to a lantern, and the light of a woman’s hair turning to constellation as she croons Tosca. This is music personified—a living, breathing entity. Darling is also able to capture the nuanced rhythms that reside in everyday movement: the tap of a painter’s brush, the hushed fall of velvet stage curtains, the shudder of beveled mirrors in their frames, the tick of a death watch beetle. Music is a collage of sound found almost anywhere.

With the advent of records, radio, the amplifier, over-dubbing, auto-tone pitch adjusters, and the marvel of the IPod, the creation and experience of music has become synthesized, removing listeners farther and farther from its original source. Darling ponders this disconnection and its affects in very unique ways.

In the poem, “The Musician Considers Modernity and He Sighs”, the reader glimpses the musician’s lament of mechanization:

The city has turned into a mechanical city, he observers one morning, a tiny ballerina

spinning inside a glistening box. Beyond the window, his wife seems adrift under the

trellis’s dank foliage, her steps measured with a strange precision. And even the chain

on his wristwatch rattles with diminutive elegy. But when the moon rises that

evening, every radio fades, and the streetcars vanish like wooden birds retreating into

a great unique clock. The discotheque holds its breath in deference.

In the poem “The New Conductor”, an old opera house has been turned into a discotheque:

remove the velvet curtains, the gilt cornices, or the great plaster cherubs above each

doorway. When the musicians arrived, dressed in sleek tuxedoes and blue silk ties, only

the building’s smallest embellishments seemed familiar.

Music is organic—Darling reminds us—always reinventing itself while still retaining its fundamentals. And like its kindred spirit, poetry, we hear the echoes and influences of the past with each new transformation and interpretation. Darling’s poems celebrate this process but at the same time also give way to elegy for what is altered in the execution.

The second half of Night Songs focuses on word collages, found texts, and erasures, the arrangement of which mirrors the process of composition itself. Darling’s verse in this section makes creative re-use of not only her poems from the first half of the collection, but the text of a Victorian music appreciation guide. What is most intriguing about these poems is the way Darling is able to illustrate the diversity of meaning and feeling that is elicited from the changing, but repetitive patterns of her own words as a way to resemble the same patterns which define music. Notice the differences in the treatments below of the poem “Ennui” and its erased version:

You walk past a crystal decanter glistening near the harpsichord. Since our guests left

for the ocean, with its dark enclaves and its low mumbling, the lakes have done

nothing but rain. And our dim halls become more cavernous with every evening.

When I ask why the rooms buzz with damseflies, you merely nod your head. The

shutters blow open and closed. Our parlor hums like trees shifting before a storm.

You                                                                                        left for the ocean

                  mumbling

                                          When I ask why,

      the shutter blow open.                 Our parlor                     before a storm.

In this way, Darling creates a kind of phonautograph of her own by transcribing the qualities of sound to a visual medium.

Reading Night Songs is a study in musical and linguistic acoustics and the natural harmonics of life. It is an active and interactive experience, and in an age when music seems to be more about a packaged product than the art of creation itself, Darling provides a venue for readers to reconnect with the true source of sound.

Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate of Washington University, where she received both an undergraduate degree in English and a master's degree in American Culture Studies. Several chapbooks of her work have been published, among them Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006) and The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006). A two-time Pushcart nominee, her poems appear in such journals as Gargoyle, Cider Press Review, Illya's Honey, and Janus Head: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies. Her literary essays and book reviews have also been published in The Gettysburg Review, The Boston Review, Shenandoah, The Colorado Review, New Letters, Pleiades, and other periodicals. Awards include residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Centrum Foundation, the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts, and the Prairie Center of the Arts, as well as scholarships from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and Colgate Writers Conference. She currently studies philosophy at the University of Missouri and hopes to pursue a doctorate in English Literature.