Like time, that ongoing “introduction to / philosophy and religion,” Gluck’s twelfth collection is hard to pin down even as it sweeps you along with its virtuosity. Call it a mini-anthology: here are lyrics, dramatic monologues, parables, and prose poems. It’s a memoir, as the poet looks back on her seventy years, and a novel, as she creates the character of a painter, orphaned as a boy. It’s also a quest tale, with the title suggesting knight as well as night, and many of the poems set off on journeys where the land is both familiar and strange, the questing artist traveling on foot, in cars, trains, and boats, as well as by memory and language. The most reliable conveyance is of course time itself, changing and transporting us even when we‘re “traveling / from day to night only.”
