Night-Sea by Rachel Moritz Reviewed by Eric Weinstein ISBN 978-1-934832-16-5
Reading Rachel Moritz’s Night-Sea, I couldn’t help but think of Whitman; although Moritz’s line is much shorter than Whitman’s (often only four or five words in length), her poems resonate with a similar subtle, yet powerful emotional salience, particularly when they focus on Night-Sea’s primary subject, Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, one might say Moritz’s poetry in this collection occupies the negative space produced by Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” Where Whitman’s writing is overtly grief-stricken, Moritz’s is somewhat elliptical; where Whitman’s lines are long and almost meandering, Moritz’s are short, displaying a superb economy of language; where Whitman focuses on a single point in time, Moritz’s book-length treatment of Lincoln reveals a manifold history of a man who was simultaneously a father, a husband, a president, and an American. Despite being the unifying presence in Night-Sea, however, Lincoln often feels far away from us, as though we as readers are observing him through rain or darkness—both recurrent themes in Moritz’s collection, as one might infer from the title—or simply through the haze of the hundred and fifty years that have passed since his lifetime. At times he seems “a little blurred figure in rain” (“Abduction,” the first poem in the collection), and Moritz notes in “Defeat” that “we are bound by distance.” Although this distance obscures Lincoln to some extent, I think it is necessary: without it, we would lose the sense of awe, the sense of gravity that Moritz works so hard to engender in us. We would also lose the ability to view Lincoln as both an American hero and as one of the virtuous dead. Night-Sea borrows language from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Dante’s Inferno, and John T. Morse, Jr.’s Abraham Lincoln, and I can think of no better works from which to draw for this collection. Lincoln is simultaneously presented as hero, historical figure, and phantom, corresponding to the manner in which he might be interpreted by Campbell, Morse, and Dante, respectively. Regardless of which aspect of the man, if any, the reader may prefer, Moritz’s haunting poems present each of them with equal skill and emotional resonance, and they are sure to stay with the reader long after he or she has finished reading.
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Prick of the Spindle Poetry Editor Eric Weinstein recently graduated magna cum laude from Duke University with an AB in English and Philosophy. His writing has previously appeared in a variety of online and print publications, including The Archive,Wheelhouse Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, and Rainy Day. His poetry hasbeen nominated for inclusion in Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the SmallPresses (2009). A native of New Hampshire, he currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.
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