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Night Music
by B. J. Buckley
49 Poems ~ 69 pages
Format: 6’’ x 9’’ ~ Perfect Bound
Price: $22.99
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
ISBN #: 979-8-88838-813-6
To Order: Finishing Line Press or Amazon.com
Reviewed by Michael Escoubas
B.J. Buckley’s Night Music features Buckley’s responses to three influential artists: Japanese painter, Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), composer Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin (1810-1849), and Pablo Neruda (1904-1973). All three lived as unequaled practitioners in their respective fields: painter, composer, and poet.
In casual conversations with the poet, I learned that the poems in Night Music took years of focused study to complete. In depth research into the lives of her subjects along with immersion into their artistic techniques has yielded a superior collection.
Buckley dedicates Night Music to cover artist Dawn Senior-Trask, her lifelong friend, no doubt because their minds and creative values share the same rarified air. Buckley also quotes an important saying by Leonardo da Vinci in her dedication:
Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt,
and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.
This famous insight serves as a guiding principle for Buckley, a principle she implements consistently into her compositions.
Night Music is organized into three divisions: “Hiroshige’s Mistress,” “Playing the Nocturnes,” and “Love and Sorrow.” The poems in each division embrace da Vinci’s maxim.
Here’s an example from “Full Moon, Late September,” in which the poet studies red:
Stillness, empty of
all motion, upon which float
rafts of fallen leaves.
Vermilion, scarlet, crimson,
burgundy, rust, carnelian–
I visualize the early autumn moon revealing color nuances, the stillness itself, a kind of caesura, blends into Buckley’s title as a significant musical component.
“Hiroshige’s Mistress: Her Pillow Book” is the lead poem in a section comprised of seven love poems. “Pillow Book” features twenty-seven poems written as extended haiku. Typically, each poem consists of five lines or less. They are gorgeously erotic:
The moon is drunk on
the sweet wine of my body–
Why, your empty glass?
Every maple, flaming pyre–
if leaves were tears–wind, crying.
Or this:
Open blossoms, rain-
filled, overflowing–scattered
on the damp earth, their
petals, red, each one a flame–
Across my floor, dropped garments.
One senses Chopin’s “mood” music in “Playing the Nocturnes.” The poet has invested time in Chopin’s compositions. She listened to their melodies as they played on the strings of her heart. Each poem bears the title of the dominant key in which Chopin composed the piece: #1 in B-flat minor, #2 in E-flat major, #3 in B major, etc. Buckley has written a poem for each of Chopin’s twenty-one nocturnes. Here is #5 in F-sharp major:
The birds, so quiet all day
in the deep cold
break their hunger–
last gathering–
sparrows,
finches,
nuthatches in pairs
mining crevices
of bark.
And ravens, the black uncles, sorrowing
in the stripped carcass
of a deer.
Red-tail hawk. A stillness
with wings.
I was totally mesmerized when I heard several of these pieces played by pianist Arthur Rubinstein. Buckley spent an entire year relearning how to play the piano, listening to Rubenstein and other classical artists play these masterpieces.
By my count Buckley’s poems feature dozens of hooved animals, fowls, fishes, felines, and trees and grasses of every description. In all three sections, Buckley skillfully weaves natural-world beauty and mystery into the warp and woof of her compositions.
Section three “Love and Sorrow,” focuses on Pablo Neruda’s love poems. Written at the virile age of nineteen, Neruda’s work is a rich mine of sensory material. Here Buckley’s use of poetic tools rises to the surface “The Wind is Washing the Leaves,” is reproduced below in full:
The wind is washing the leaves and hanging them to dry
on the slenderest twigs, the thinnest branches, the wind
is laundering the old clothes worn by willow and cottonwood,
so ragged, so yellow, torn and spattered insect wing, burned
by early frosts. If I had a shirt with a frayed collar a small
stain, loose button hanging by a blue thread like a tiny
moon suspended from a pocket, I could let the wind
take it up in her hands, I could let the air’s clean body
pretend, for awhile, that it loved me, though we both
were so poor, and dressed in rags.
You may have noticed that this poem consists of two extended sentences. The lines are paced and nurtured as one in love might let thoughts and words “wash out” with the wind.
Patterning her poems after Neruda, using free form with lineage varying from ten-syllables to fourteen, Buckley “lets herself go,” like a blues musician following the music wherever it leads. I wonder what notes the poet was hearing when she wrote:
Any part of you would be enough, enough for me–
the softness of your hair scattered across my pillow.
Pick up a copy of Night Music and be immersed in the sights, sounds, and mysteries of love. You may well decide to compose your own "night music."
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