The wisdom and enigma of Kevin Young's "Night Watch"

Making sense of poetry's bold emotions and hidden meanings

Poet Kevin Young’s Night Watch, the Book Club’s September selection, is divided into four sections or cycles; the first, “The Cormorant,” consists of a single poem. The subject is a lowly bird:

Nobody’s angel—
even your crown, unkempt,
looks like an egret

in an oil slick, inelegant

Its wings are “waxless”—they aren’t waterproof—so after diving into the water to fish, the bird alights on a stump to dry off, “wings raised like a crucifix unpraised.” The sighting conjures in Young a memory of his father,

driving home, his hand a map

pointing out shacks where Negroes
once lived, now
only timber & anger, still there

The last couplet of the poem speaks directly to the narrator’s grief, with simple lines rendering a son’s mourning palpable:

if only
I could see you again, hungry,
waiting, at the edge of the bayou.

How, we wonder, does the cormorant, generally viewed as an ignoble pest, stand in for Young’s father? Or is this a misreading? Does the encounter provoke the memory in some other way?

Some poetry—many of Mary Oliver’s poems, for example—feels effortless to read. Their poignancy lies in their clarity and reverence for the natural world. Think of this line from “The Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Young’s Night Watch, on the other hand, is full of mystery and sleight of hand. There is the desire to commune with the dead—and just as strong a wish to elude their grasp.

What do the various moons in the second cycle, “All Souls,” represent for Young? Is the moon a guiding light, or something more foreboding:

Execution moon.
Hanging there

There’s also the full moon of March, the worm moon, “cut in two,” marking the end of winter and the arrival of spring and new life, but with the power to wound, to plague, to cut; and, later in the year, as life runs its course, we find the moon of the harvest:

Harvest moon.
My howling heart—
mouth a mask.
What say you?
The sun
knows nothing.

Young’s compact, clever, pithy verses can be read for their melody and the feelings they evoke, and they can also be parsed for clues to deep meaning. What do you make of them? We will have the chance to burrow further into Night Watch in the coming weeks, and on Wednesday, September 24, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, Kevin Young will join us once again for a deeper conversation about the book.

Later this month, we’ll be giving Ink Book Club members access to additional conversations with the authors of some great new books. First up will be Nicholas Boggs, author of Baldwin: A Love Story, the highly praised New York Times bestselling biography of James Baldwin, live on Wednesday, September 17 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern. Join us today, and look out for further announcements.

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