The Night Chorus
Poems that give voice and agency to marginal figures in rural places and cityscapes.
Description
A whistling through teeth. / He shuts his eyes but still sees / the red glow of exit signs. Harold Hoefle's The Night Chorus rises out of forests and country roads, bars and buses, cities and small towns. These locales are the haunts of outsiders ranging from travellers and farmers to a soldier, a drug addict, a refugee, and the murdered. The past clings in these stark, evocative poems, "memory a closet of clothes / that hang from bent wire." In the tradition of songwriters like Gordon Lightfoot and Gord Downie and poets such as Al Purdy, Karen Solie, and David O'Meara, The Night Chorus presents so-called "obscure" lives, where dark and playful humour collides with historic and mythic characters including Ovid and Dante, Odysseus and Desdemona. Using lyric poetry and the ghazal, the prose poem and the elegy, The Night Chorus brims with images as sharp as wild geese scrawling letters against an evening sky and as humble as "pots of plum dumplings and still-warm soup." Bookended by a sequence of lyrics inspired by cross-country road trips, Hoefle references iconic places like Black Dog Road and Seldom Seen and peoples the landscape with imagined characters. Their voices – damaged, rough, intimate – will echo in the reader's mind.
Reviews
"The Night Chorus sings of a private world that spans from Lac La Pêche to the British Museum, from a rural ditch to the city bus. These poems access memories, intimate conversations, and seemingly ordinary moments that Harold Hoefle discerns with the bright precision of a jeweller. To read The Night Chorus is to drive along a road that, in Hoefle's words, "climbs, dips, arcs, cup[s] the world in a curve." Where you stop to rest is often where you will want to linger for a while longer." Gillian Sze, author of Panicle
"'Intensify' is the Rilkean injunction that Harold Hoefle both declares and practises in this propulsive first collection of poems. I admire equally the energy of his lines and the range of his sympathies." Steven Heighton, 2016 Governor General's Poetry Award winner for The Waking Comes Late