Unanimous Night: (Salt Modern Poets)

Unanimous Night is the second full-length collection from Tokyo-based poet Michael Brennan. Unanimous Night is an elegy affirming experience, the depth and interconnectedness of each singular moment. Moving from the displacement and dislocation of his first award-winning collection The Imageless World, Brennan builds new paths into a dream-like and quietly hallucinatory experience of that world, wherein the experience of language is inseparable from the experience of being, where dream and daylight reality interweave, arriving through the erasure of the self. Meditative and celebratory, these poems come to praise this world without obscuring its violence, seeking out timelessness and stillness in the constant evolution of light and sensual experience, in the permanence of loss, the vastness of the elemental, the proximity of friendship, family and lovers, and the transitory beauty of each moment given in the senses. In these poems, love and experience reveal themselves not in the will to grasp and hold, to know and understand, to stabilize and secure, but as an opening of the self to the world that rushes through the brief eclipse of time in the sensual, the momentary and fragmentary, and the sometimes brutal, grip of memory. Recalling the work of Popa and Rilke, Unanimous Night is a love song, the recognition of an elsewhere that constantly evolves within and beyond the contemporary – its horrors and hatreds, its fragility, uncertain truths and knowing – a world of moments and presence, of love and communion, where language and being, the living and the dead, the natural and the technological, the instant and endless converge, where longing turns through healing to the intimacy of experience, of the ever-arriving and wholly present. Unanimous Night is an approach to the space where language and experience coalesce, where subjectivity gives way to the shared experiences of love, mourning and desire, where being offers itself to the violence and grace of another, to an intimacy where being is being shared.

Table of Contents:
Unanimous Night Letter Home Letter Home Sky Was Sky Sky Was Sky Flowers Earth Everywhere Bonewalls Before Never Gift She The Earth Here Old House Dwelling The One Who Left Us Earth Or Sky Seed Now Twenty Studies Étude (no.1) Étude (no.2) Étude (no.3) Étude (no.4) Étude (no.5) Étude (no.6) Étude (no.7) Étude (no.8) Étude (no.9) Étude (no.10) Étude (no.11) Étude (no.12) Étude (no.13) Étude (no.14) Étude (no.15) Étude (no.16) Étude (no.17) Étude (no.18) Étude (no.19) Étude (no.20) Letter Home Letter Home Letter Home The Disaster of Grace The Mirror in Love Amnesia Singles Tentative Together Menagerie Autumn Winter Spring Summer Letter Home Letter Home Unanimous Night North Country Abstracts Letter Home Letter Home Letter Home Monologue in the Dream Monologue in the Dream Private Ruin Depth Rebirth Husk Decoding Impartial Bystander Letter Home Letter Home Letter Home Letter Home

About the Author :
Michael Brennan was born in Sydney in 1973. His first collection, The Imageless World (Salt, 2003) was short-listed for the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry and won the Mary Gilmore Award. Brennan received the 2004 Marten Bequest for Poetry and is the Australian editor of www.poetryinternational.org. He currently lives in Nagoya, Japan where he is a lecturer in the Department of Asian Studies and Foreign Languages, Nagoya Shoka Daigaku.

Review :
You feel a pulse underneath Brennan's poetry, a profound but philosophically clear-eyed belief in relationships. -- Martin Duwell Australian Book Review, February 2009