Night Journey

John (English pop musician) Taylor

Night Journey by Maria Negroni, tr. Anne Twitty. Princeton University Press, 144 pp., $12.50. Why is it hard to listen to someone else's dreams? Why do dreams, in literary works, often exhibit a symbolism that seems contrived?

These questions are often brilliantly surpassed by Negroni's strange, sometimes obscure, yet ultimately engaging Night Journey, a sequence of sixty-two versified (yet simultaneously prosepoem-like) pieces mixing oneiric phantasmagoria with philosophical speculations and sudden confessions. As in "real dreams"? Perhaps not, after all. And for this reason, as the Argentinean poet blends hallucinatory imagery with the expression of more complex, less unconscious states of mind, her writing takes on a force, and a sincerity, not always stemming from the classic, rationality-liberating, surrealist techniques that she otherwise applies. Above all, Negroni convincingly expresses what it feels like to see "everything / with a child's eyes," even after one's adult heart has been "burnt to ashes from long intimacy with absence."

"The presence of absence" is a recurrent concern of this ardent night-voyager who is seeking to free herself from fate, to experience mystical moments when "each thought is every thing that is," and to love. Often referring to cryptic events and variously evoking Stockholm, Milan, Manhattan, Buenos Aires, the Himalayas, or Nevada, the narrator sometimes calls out to an unnamed beloved "you." She also hearkens to the archangel Gabriel, who is alternatively male and female.

Arising from this intricate collection is a message. The poet comes to learn that her quest is both multiple and unified; for her, the act of writing cannot be separated from loving, from remembering, from voyaging out. The oracular archangel first voices this insight by reminding Negroni that "only compliance" with the negative, nightmarish aspects of life can reveal the "hidden splendor of the voyage" and bear her "into the/invisible center of the poem."

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning