The Night Divers - by Melanie McCabe (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Melanie McCabe's third collection moves like a record, cyclical and singing. These elegiac poems turn over the tender and fraught intimacy of two sisters-one gone and one left to tell their story. The reader is invited into their shared history via a wonderfully precise imagination that is grounded in the real. This speaker is haunted, not by spirits, but by the physical world that her sister has departed, as in the opening of "Days That Should Have Been Yours" "Damp earth and honeysuckle rise into the air / I am left with." Each poem brims with a quiet intensity. As a collection, they hover like a murmuration-cohesive, sensual, just high enough to see everything clearly.

-Danielle Cadena Deulen, Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us

Review Quotes

Melanie McCabe's The Night Divers summons the ghosts of public and personal history in radiant poems of rare poignance and power. The poet looks back on a lost America of carefree pleasures that once seemed lasting, elegizing her beloved sister through ocean views, old Polaroids, "disgruntled gulls," and more that serve as both vivid backdrop and vibrant metaphor. McCabe is equally attentive to our contemporary moment, an era of necessary entreaties on behalf of a planet under siege: "Call back the buzz, the exodus from the gassed hive./... Guard us like mink and ivory and whale song." In poems enriched by outmoded artifacts such as her father's "Deco fan" or an old Deep Purple song, as well as by a deep connection to the natural world's wonders, McCabe remains attentive to all that remains unsaid, and we are the richer for it. She has learned to "judge between the quiet and the gone"-between secrets told and those withheld-in poems that are beautifully crafted, inventive, and impossible to forget.

-Ned Balbo, The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots

The Night Divers wells up out of the most ancient and pure spring of poetry-the attempt to recover the beloved from death by means of sound, of song. This book is full of keening and birds, but also the specific lives of two sisters: ocean and pool, Coppertone and baby oil, Marlboros and makeup, the unique intimacy of playing underwater as if together in the womb. Though, of course, doomed to fail, like Orpheus, McCabe brings her sister back to the very verge of life. Magical and haunting.

-Barbara Ungar, Save Our Ship