Preface Poem by Daniel Brick

What is NIGHT? Is it primarily a physical fact or a state of being?
From my perspective as the writer of these poems, Night is indeed primarily a state of being, conditioned by our human psychology with
its complex interplay of emotion and reason and the equally complex interplay of Self and World. Symbolist writers and artists of the late 19th century used the term "soul-state, " which expresses my understanding of the Interior World. It suggests the experience of
NIGHT is limitless, dimensions of time and space collapse before it, and night become porous, offering many points of entry and exit to and from its Mystery.

If we define, that is, limit night to the time frame between 6 pm and 6 am, we have thereby made night the realm of darkness and made day
the realm of light, and they are equal in length, namely twelve hours each. Such is the language of physical fact, but it does not reveal the night, merely points to it. The experience of night requires a more poetic use of language.

I love summer nights because darkness doesn't fall, it encroaches. It
permeates the atmosphere as much as the landscape. It slowly absorbs the light and creates twilight from the mixture. Twilight is like a finely textured Persian rug that softly guides into the deeper depths of night. When darkness has spread itself across the landscape like an
opaque carpet, I do not want to flood it with electric lights, but rather live for a while in that absence of ordinary light, which summons others senses - hearing, touch, smell - to make sense of the
world. When John Keats follows the nightingale's flight into the dense
woods, he uses his sense of smell to guide him, following a path
made by the scents of white hawthorn, pastoral eglantine, violets and other flowers, and he experience the darkness not as an alien presence, a fearful time, but rather he exclaims "tender is the
night" and rejoices in its beauty.

But the night hold many things of wonder in its dark estate. There lurks what peasants call the "Hour of the Wolf." There are legendary transformations of human beings into terrifying creatures. And humans who lose their way because they are blind to the dangers of this alien
experience may be trapped in a labyrinth for the duration of darkness.
Then dawn will descend like a column of light and raise them out of their nightmare.

The poems of this collection contain a range of encounters with the Night Realm. It is reminiscent of a message given to one of the
medieval Grail Knights who is about to enter upon a dark road: "Here
begin the Terrors, here begin the Miracles." The Night Journeyer needs a similar faith, or call it courage, that the region of danger is also the region of rescue.

I did not know where my poems would take me when I began to wrote
them, but when I finished writing "The Awakened Dreamer" and read
the last line - "The Nights have never been so pure." - I realized my Night Journey as a poet was over: there is no other line of verse that could provide a better closure than that one which came naturally, suddenly, unbidden but welcome to the page.

I hesitated to include the final poem, "Morning Light in Spring, "
because it takes the reader out of the Night Realm into daylight reality, like the "column of light" referred to in this Preface.
Then I remembered a late poem by Wallace Stevens which gave the larger context of Reality, of which my poems are only a portion:

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day in night, the imagined

On the real....

That is not the theme of my collection, but it is the truth of things expressed clearly and forcefully. I may myself linger longer in the Night Realm, but when I must depart for new places, to answer different calls, these words of Stevens may be my rescue. Or at least my transport. Until that time, I am a blind swimmer in the River of
the Night Realm.