Circadian

Nearly every poem in Klink's sophomore collection has at its emotional center a pastoral bewilderment born of the tension between the physical world and the metaphysical split between self and other. Klick's rampant use of nature imagery—of light, wind and snow accentuating fields, paths, fir trees and waterways, and of the numerous animal inhabitants therein (“Around the lake, the air/ filled with moths, light as pencil outlines”)—gives way to a tone that is meditative, aphoristic, at times cold, creating an external foil for the interior conflict between the speaker and the addressee (“single star streaking in cracked silence/ above our argument”). Klink (They Are Sleeping ) is at her best weaving together multiple narrative threads—ones that hint or gesture toward larger stories—in order to ground her poems in the natural world; at times, her extended descriptions progress with an overly distant feel. However, perhaps this is the point: one is never sure of each poem's central concern (“Perhaps there are two seas,/ one below the surface and one above”), and when the disparate elements come together (“an animal crosses the wide field/ in you”), one is left, quite satisfyingly, in what this poet calls a “silence clean of every concept.” (June)