Night Swimming is an incandescent ride through modern poetry and sexual politics, with a thriller plot that will keep your nerves jittering all the way to the climax. It’s also a guide through the territory of insomnia, with its festival of hallucinatory, blackout, sleepwalking night-terror drugs.

Review: Night Swimming – Sharon Kernot (Text Publishing)

Sharon Kernot knows how to make a pressing, potent, aching song from a stanza of free verse lines – and how to make a page of poetry talk its way into your head, until you can’t imagine this story being told in any other way than this hyper-present, syncopated series of stabs at reality, connection, meaning and clarity.

Told in the first person and the present tense (sometimes as “I”, but mostly a step removed from herself, addressed as “you”), there is no escape from the mind of the narrator, January Clare Colson. On the very first page, she lets us know:

… there are nights when I can’t sleep at all. There are nights when I have an hour, or two. There are nights that divide into segments. I have nightmares, sleep paralysis, sometimes I have micro sleeps— tiny absences

… there are nights when I can’t sleep at all. There are nights when I have an hour, or two. There are nights that divide into segments.

I have nightmares, sleep paralysis, sometimes I have micro sleeps— tiny absences

From here, we learn gradually of the terrors, the guilt, the remorse and the suspicions that bedevil her life, all centred on a fatal incident in her early teenage years, when........

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