The Night Watch
by Niall Campbell
It’s 1 a.m. and someone’s knocking
at sleep’s old, battered door —
and who could it be but this boy I love,
calling for me to come out, into
the buckthorn field of being awake —
and so I go, finding him there
no longer talking — but now crying
and crying, wanting to be held;
but shhh, what did you want to show
that couldn’t wait until the morning?
Was it the moon — because I see it:
the first good bead on a one-bead string;
was it the quiet — because I owned it,
once — but found I wanted more.
From Noctuary. Reproduced with kind permission of Bloodaxe Books.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Collection 2019
Noctuary
Niall Campbell
About Niall Campbell
Niall Campbell (b. 1984, South Uist) published his first collection, Moontide, a month after the birth of his son: the poems in Noctuary (a journal of the night hours) were written in whatever moments he could snatch from the larger responsibilities of parenthood. ‘The world, I think, seems larger in my first collection, while in this book it is often just the size of a dark room’, he writes.
One of the inspirations for Noctuary were the Elegies of Douglas Dunn: as Dunn’s work is a book of ‘love strewn through with sadness’, Campbell envisaged his own poems as being animated by love intermingled with ‘the hope, the tenderness, the exhaustion’ of being a father. He lives in Manchester, and is currently collaborating on an opera with the composer Anna Appleby.
Forward Prizes History:
- 2014 Forward Prizes for Best First Collection, shortlisted for Moontide (Bloodaxe)
