Martha Collins is the author of numerous collections of poems, most recently Night Unto Night and its companion, Day Unto Day. She has also published four collections of cotranslated Vietnamese poetry, including Black Stars: Poems by Ngo Tu Lap (with the author). Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute, and the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as an Anisfield-Wolf Award, two Ohioana Awards, the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, and three Pushcart Prizes. Founder of the creative writing program at UMass-Boston, she served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College until 2007, and is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press.
This masterful companion to Day Unto Day finds common ground between contradictions—beauty and horror, joy and mortality, the personal and the political. Like its predecessor, this collection begins with time: six sequences, each written in one month a year, over the course of six years, bringing together the natural and the all-too-human.
During one month each year, for six years, the author wrote a short poem each day. The resulting six sequences of this masterly collection offer haunting reflections on time, and capture the aching, liminal beauty of one day becoming another.
Simultaneously occupying past, present, and future, this collection suffuses image with memory and darkness with abundant light. In these masterful translations—printed alongside the original Vietnamese—the poems sing out with the wisdom that comes to those who have lived through war, traveled far, and seen a great deal.
