Sjón’s book of poetry nightwork is powerful and layered, clear-sighted and dreamlike. His characteristically rich imagery evokes strong emotion and compelling lines of thought on the human creature and the world, myth and everyday reality in dialogue, his use of language unlike anything else.
The work engages the internal as well as the external, light and dark and these visions coming together somewhere at night, at the moment when one’s interiority encounters what one’s eyes glimpse in reality.
nightwork is Sjón’s 13th book of poetry and the writer’s first book of poetry in seven years.
Sjón, from an interview with Jóhannes Ólafsson in the program Víðsjá on the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service:
“There’s a tradition in talking about the night as the time of poetry. It is perhaps at this time that the poet finds the quiet to process everything the world brings them. While the others sleep, the poet is awake listening to their thoughts, all that has accrued over the course of days.
… I think that perhaps now, after two years of a worldwide plague and everything it has brought in tow, isolation, a disruption of the everyday, a reevaluation of how we interact and new rules of communication and inward contemplation that has been ushered in by all this, this book has somehow been waiting to come into being.
… we are creatures who possess both an internal and external vision, and it is where these two come together that the human exists. The book is simply examining that condition, that moment when one’s interiority encounters what one’s seeing eyes glimpse in reality. … During the early months of this worldwide plague, people often started to have a lot of dreams and pay attention to their dreams. … it was as if in this silence that came over the world and this confinement, because people were getting a full night’s sleep despite it all, a rich dream life emerged around the world. For an old surrealist, this was naturally a very interesting situation. And the book also speaks to this with people. It’s clear that such a huge event changes the world. It changes the human and none of us can escape it. And yet we don’t know what it is and don’t know how it will affect us. But it is fair to say, I think, that it has called for an internal examination.
… When the world is at the brink of upheaval then, I think, it’s very good to be able to access the subconscious. For those of us that live in the northern reaches of the world or far south on the globe, we know that night is not always dark. It can be bright and clear and we can see even more clearly at night. I won’t go so far as to say whether we are coming out of two years of night or two years of dark day. It could be a dark day or a clear, bright night we’re emerging from. But this is also one of the things that’s in the book, there’s always an exploration of how things can be turned upside down and that’s what the poet can do, they can invert reality.”
