Neruda Nights by Helen Degen Cohen

These richly candid poems are occasioned by the night and its solitudes. Their subjects emerge, like night-blooming plants, from Neruda, seen here as a growth medium, a loose, fertile soil, not so much, then, from specific texts as from his nurturing freedoms. Memory, desire, regret, words on the page all have physical presences—sound, touch, taste—in this very personal, angular, delightfully strange, but wholly accessible night music.
–Michael Anania

Be prepared to become an eavesdropper—a voyeur of a kind—when you enter Helen Degen Cohen’s Neruda Nights. You will stand just outside the narrator’s window looking in, but the narrator will always be looking past you—or through you—as you stand privy to her quietest hours of dark, of memory, of light. You will overhear her speaking to an ever-shifting, invisible “you”—the night, Neruda, love, and, at the heart of this collection, a man who has awakened the persona’s senses—or who perhaps has moved into a sensual space already created by Neruda himself. John Stuart Mill may have believed “eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard,” but these poems seem to defy that—becoming more eloquent because of their private nature paired with the constant presence of one or more unseen auditors. The reader may very well ask at the end of these poems: “Who am I, now that / you’re part of my life?” The answer may very well surprise you. And it will certainly make you want to reread the collection over and over again.
— Andrea Witzke Slot, author of To find a new beauty

Every journey begins, laozi wisely wrote, when you put your foot down. Helen Degen Cohen puts her foot down in Neruda Nights with “The catness of your everywhere…” Yes. Both the everywhere and the catness of it prepare us for the way these poems move, the way they touch — the way a cat follows a wall, exposing borders that are anything but reasonable right on the edge of invisibility. The poet is “homeless / almost by nature,” at home in the wandering. As in Neruda, the personal is so profoundly intense that it is political: “Rain is again a wonder, / as are my wet /socks.” What is remarkable about these poems is the desire permeating the most ordinary things — “we were m’s the s’s could crawl into,” a girl recalls, and, earlier, “We got there in a state / of awe / without knowing it, without / having traveled.” Without knowing it, possibility everywhere, crawl into these poems. Beginning after beginning, they cross borders. This poet lets you use her rain, and it is a wonder.
–Steven Schroeder, author of Turn

What Sir Isaac Newton’s alchemy only sought, Helen Degen Cohen‘s poetry achieves — the transposition of one core element into another. With “Neruda Nights,” Cohen transforms elegy into ode, the ache of loss into the joy of gain. The poet confesses, “I gave myself to what I lost.” But she has journeyed from there “for words that touch skin,” for the “opening within.” And farther still. Nights is filled with movement and color and scent and delight–from “the way flowers grow out of Neruda,” to “a perfect mango,” and the “reasons for my gratitude.” For both poet and reader, the bliss of “Neruda Nights” “makes you dream all over again.”
–Ralph Hamilton

Rating:  ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]