Civil Twilight

Cynthia Huntington is the author of several collections of poetry, including Terra Nova; Heavenly Bodies, which was nominated for a National Book Award; Levis Prize-winner The Radiant; We Have Gone to the Beach, which won the Beatrice Hawley Award and the Jane Kenyon Award; and The Fish-Wife; and the nonfiction prose volume The Salt House. Huntington is an emeritus professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College, a former Guggenheim Fellow, a former poet laureate of New Hampshire, and a two-time National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Poetry.

Praise for Heavenly Bodies“Cynthia Huntington’s Heavenly Bodies is a fearless and exacting exploration of illness, addiction, abuse, and the waning of American idealism. These poems are unblinking in the face of dark subject matter, and surprising in their capacity for hope, for grace. Huntington’s speakers are as vast and compassionate—as empathetic and multitudinous—as Whitman’s, and they sing of the beauty and seductive brutality of survival in a world perpetually ‘alight with new dangers.’”—Judges Citation, National Book Foundation“Huntington, who can tune a lyric any way she likes, has written exquisite poems, some of which turn tragedy into transcendence...But in this book, we suspect that Huntington is tired of rapture and redemption, and that her real subject is disobedience. Her poems in Heavenly Bodies resist transcendent turns just to please the reader, offering instead the body of the poem as it is, without lipstick or peignoir.”—Julia Shipley, Seven DaysPraise for Terra Nova“This is a magnificent work, focused on the history of an all but sea-surrounded town. The poet [tells] stories through many voices, from the elevated language of creation myth and prophetic rebuke, to vivid, realistic barroom scenes, hapless and violent, mediated through a voice of personal account and self-accounting. . . . It is one poem with many poems (some of them in prose) carried through the passionate singing rhythm of these voices, becoming the one grand poem that is the book.”—David Ferry, author, Bewilderment, and winner, National Book Award in Poetry“Provincetown is the locus of this ambitious, wide-ranging, and archetypal collection, which takes up various histories of migration and exile and reimagines them for our time. Terra Nova has the feeling of a biblical prophecy, a lost book that has washed up from the sea.”—Edward Hirsch, author, Gabriel: A Poem

• CONTENTSHard FrostPart One: SnowAfter a Line by TranstromerNow That I Am in Finland and Can ThinkDream CertificationCommunity Center YogaOne Lamp in a Doorway and One Down the ValleyAt the Death HouseSpikeShelterFirewoodRiver RoadPart Two: Civil TwilightDemolitionThe Meek Shall Eat Our DustApril PastoralIn Mud SeasonConversion MetricDaciaHow to Read American HistoryLate TenementHart CraneNijinskyOn a Line from Robinson JeffersHome Footage: 1970Will Spring Ever Come to the North CountryPart Three: Deer in a Gated ParkDeer in a Gated Park: A Poem in Five PartsPart Four: Garden BenchView through AperturesTeshuvaHorsePrivate BeachJackass AngelsAfter PessoaThe Value of PoetryWe Will Be TwohumGarden Bench