Review: Night Song – Daan Katz

During the summer, I got to know the work of Daan Katz via his short story in the charity anthology Children of War, which supports the children of Ukraine. My review of this multi-author, multi-genre collection can be found here. His contribution to this anthology immediately made me curious to discover more of his work, so a couple of weeks later, I dived into Night’s Reign, the first book of his the Curse of the Fathers Series (review). Afterwards, I read the stand-alone novel set in the same universe, Death and the Maiden (review). Today, I’ll tell you more about his poetry bundle, Night Song. Thanks again, Daan, for this wonderful signed edition!

Night Song

Night Song is a collection of 46 fantasy cinquains, spanning a broad range of themes. It’s the first book in the Songs of Redemption Series. The book opens with a preface that includes a short creation story, and then follow poems grouped into three parts. I have to admit poetry analysis was never my forte at university, but I’ll try to explain what it means that the poems are all cinquains: each poem consists of five lines, and they all follow a similar pattern of 2 – 4 – 6 – 8 – 2 syllables and 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 1 stresses. When I tried my hand at poetry, I usually went for free form as I am not any good at locating stress and keeping myself to strict formats. However, when reading this book, I immediately felt the urge to try this poetry style as it seemed so elegant in its brevity (albeit very difficult).

The first poem opens with the line “Night’s reign”, which is a reference to his book by the same title that was still upcoming at the time of publication of this bundle. And either I am paranoid, or there are much more links to be found 😉

I loved how each of these poems read as mini-fantasy tales. Although these poems are by definition short, they had a lot of depth and inspired reflection. And dragons <3 so many dragons <3 My personal favourites were flight, candid, behold, tangle and reveal.

In the blurb, there was one sentence in particular that caught my attention:

And many other themes that are as relevant to real life as they are to fiction.

When I was studying literature, one of the topics I loved to explore was the interaction between fiction and reality, the way both concepts mirror each other, blur and merge, and yet seem to be considered so distinct my most. And yet, as Daan points out, the themes that matter to us in reality are reflected in fiction and the other way around. This bundle is indeed a beautiful example of exactly this principle.

Highly recommended to all fantasy and poetry fans out there! Five out of five gemstones.