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ekeiser8 's review for:
The Watch That Ends the Night
by Allan Wolf
This book was absolutely fantastic and quite unique. Wolf tells the story of the voyage and subsequent sinking of the TITANIC by way of poetry. Using a dozen or so different voices of real people who sailed on the ship, Wolf weaves together fiction and history to create an utterly compelling tale. Now, I've seen all the Titanic movies and read various other books on the subject - it's always been something that has fascinated me. So I wasn't expecting to feel anything new or different when reading this book, but I was pleasantly surprised. I felt like I was hearing the story for the first time all over again. Wolf's poetic form for his novel truly moved me. It was a fresh look at a story that we have all heard so many times. To be honest, it takes a little time to get used to Wolf's poetic voice, as it does with any poet, really. Most of his poems don't really read like traditional poems. They read much more like prose, and it's best to just read those as if they weren't poems, I'm sad to say. If you try too hard to read them like "poems" (in the traditional sense) they come off stiff and awkward. There are other voices, especially that of the Iceberg (yes... the Iceberg has a voice in Wolf's novel - a rather beautiful and haunting one, I might add) that are eloquently poetic. Then there are those poems in the middle that confused me and bothered me the most. There were some that slightly read like poems but slightly read like prose. They had somewhat of a rhyme scheme...sometimes...and then the rhyme scheme vanished and came back again four lines later. They were still beautiful and intriguing, but their structure completely confused me. But in the end, no one really cares about the exact structure of a poem. That's the beauty of being a poet - you can do whatever you want with your poem. There are no limitations; there are no rules. And Wolf definitely breaks any rules about poetry people might have, but in a fantastic way. This is definitely worth a read.