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Synopsis
In this new collection, Josephine Dickinson’s poems move out towards the cosmos and inwards on a journey of transformation – the ‘night journey’ of the title. Between the first poem’s imagery of the moth chrysalis and the shape-shifting spells of the last, each poem or sequence has at its centre a movement towards epiphany. The long central sequence of ‘Elegies’ follows the journey of a grief. But the tone of this collection is ultimately ecstatic, its dominating influence one of light. The poet questions the equation of ‘night’ with ‘darkness’. Night assumes instead the nature of a lover, host to dreams and what is beyond the ordinary senses. “There are enormous silences between groups of words as if she is waiting for the resonance of each to be thoroughly gone before the next arrives. The effect is like nothing I have heard.” — Alan Franks, The Times Josephine Dickinson has published two previous collections in the UK, Scarberry Hill and The Voice, and one in the US, Silence Fell, which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice in the Sunday Book Review. At the age of six she became deaf overnight. She lives on a small hill farm in the high Pennines.
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