What We’re Reading: The Night We’re Not Sleeping In

The Night We’re Not Sleeping In, by Sean Bishop (Sarabande Books, 2014)

Sean Bishop’s debut book of poetry, The Night We’re Not Sleeping In, was the recipient of the 2013 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry as selected by Susan Mitchell. Mitchell, who wrote the forward, calls it a “book equal to our dark and savage world,” and that is about as apt a description as it gets. It is a personal, elegiac, surreal tour through the depths of grief, and it is nothing short of a phenomenal read.

The devil, the underworld, biblical figures, and various adaptations of Greek mythology have all converged upon this book, which is essentially a non-sequential tale of the speaker’s grief over the death of his father following a brain surgery. These beautiful poems are centered around the grueling process where one learns to function again after a loss of that magnitude.

In many of the poems it’s as though the speaker has progressed to the point in his grief where he’s emerged from the most brutal throes, but he’s still speaking from a place where his grieving is never far removed; where it can resurface at any time. It surfaces at an airport in the poem, “Letter to Toss from an Airborne Plane”:

Dear dead dad: a birdlike therapist
demanded of me this letter. It’s winter:

out on the tarmac sleet cakes the wings
of the morning’s latest delays

and the terminal’s filling with bodies and bodies
that only want to go. Outside Gate 2A,

the mechanics have wrenched a gear from the plane,
squabbled, locked up, and walked off.

And this is why I thought of you today

[…]

Tomorrow

it could be the branch the width of your wrist
that reminds me, the cleft in a stranger’s chin,

or a food stain blooming in the cookbook you left.

Another poem, “Red Shift” — also taking place in “Gate 2A” — is about this sudden resurfacing of grief and the way it can suddenly change the meaning of an otherwise unceremonious moment:

If Sean Bishop is sitting on the wing
of a Boeing 727, flying
381 miles per hour due east,

and Ron Bishop’s on an Airbus A320
cruising due west at equivalent speed,

by how much must either decelerate to hear
how brightly the maples, this year, are burning?

[…]

Here and now. Wherever I am
today, among some things, some faces.

One of me lives in each of these places.
One of me lives, and none of him.

Like “Letter to Toss from an Airborne Plane” and “Red Shift,” another standout poem is “Reading Dante in the ICU” — an incredible poem culminating in what may be the book’s most searing moment, where all the frantic feelings of impending loss and terror and grief suddenly crystallize to create this raw hospital scene:

when the drill punches in, the patient comes to,

as if he’d trekked back to the maze-like places
of youth, or the womb, and just needed a space
to escape through. In hell,

says Dante, there is just such a space
although no one ever finds it —
so some of the dead must do

what they refused to do in life, forever,
while others must do things they did, over
and over again. In an hour or two

the surgeon will call me in, and frown,
and smooth his green gown, and give me
the odds. And then I’ll be left to the hoses

inflating my father with breath. Some things
I’ve done in this world I know
I’ll have to do again.

The underworld is revisited in the third section of the book, which is the only section out of four that is not made of multiple stand-alone poems, but rather one eight-part poem. It’s titled “To Throw the Little Bones That Speak,” and it is the surreal (if not downright creepy) tale of the “boatlady Karen,” a spin on the Hades ferryman, Charon. In the poem, Karen disappears and the speaker has to captain the decaying vessel himself past “musty woods and their choir of toads,” “the soft glow of approaching lava” and “petty carnages of beetles,” as tourists press pennies into his palm.

There are several poems in the book that, with their surreal and mythical quality, have the effect of balancing the poems that are more “face-value” pieces about grieving. Scattered as they are throughout the collection, they give a book as a whole a certain lift that it might otherwise lack. Grief can be a difficult subject as it’s prone to getting bogged down with nostalgia, but these surreal interjections seem to circumvent that. Of course that’s not to say that surreal poems about hell add light-heartedness to the collection, per se, but they do seem to be placed strategically in an effort to give the reader a diversion. It’s not without some guilt that I enjoyed these diversions, because I got the feeling that this hell that Bishop writes about is not an abstract place that was studied in a college mythology course, but a very real and anguished place where our speaker is living. In that sense, the book feels much like a poetic and personal memoir that, like the poem, “To Throw the Little Bones That Speak,” allows us in as tourists for a short sightseeing trip along the banks of a personal hell.

Several of the poems in the book speak directly to the reader, like the series of seven poems all titled “Secret Fellow Sufferers.” Staggered throughout the book, these ask us direct questions (“have you been the unwinged thing perched and testing the phone wire’s teeter?”) and issue statements (“our fathers are liars”). Bishop also addresses the reader directly with his closing poem, “Notes Toward Basic Betterness.” He writes:

For once, inner bitterness, I think I’d like
not to forgive it, exactly, but at least allow its fact

[…]

How the moon, now that I think of it,

might rather be the golf ball abandoned on its surface,
or one just like it: a dimpled concept of itself

the people of Earth can hold and consider,
so it might feel at last what I

am feeling for you right now,
secret reader.

The poems that address the reader serve several functions. One, they allow us to witness the speaker’s grief while feeling a bit less like voyeurs — it’s as if we’re being invited in by the speaker, even welcomed. Two, they indicate that the speaker is not necessarily feeling alienated in his grief, but rather, he’s recognizing that he’s been inducted into a “secret fellowship” of grieving citizens whom he may not always recognize, but whom he wants to acknowledge nonetheless, as they are the people who read poetry, pass him on the street, or share a row of seats on a flight.

For those who would enjoy a poetic journey through the deep and complex depths of the grieving human mind, this book comes with my highest recommendation. Bishop paints a painfully gorgeous scene for us with this first collection, and it’s a scene that most readers will feel honored to have been invited to witness.

Have you read any other collections of poetry that felt very personal or that read like a poetic memoir? What aspects of the book made it feel so personal, and did it make the book more relatable?