In <em>The Midnight</em>'s five sections, three of poetry and two of prose amply illustrated with images Susan Howe has collected, we find bed hangings, unfinished lace, ghosts, family photographs, whispers, interjections, the fly-leaves of old books, <em>The Master of Ballantrae</em>, Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Lady Macbeth, Thomas Sheridan, Michael Drayton, Olmsteda restless brood confronting, absorbing, and refracting history and language. With an inspired and inimitable verbal energy which takes on shades of wit, insomnia, and terror, <em>The Midnight</em> becomes a kind of dialog in which the prose and poetry sections seem to be dreaming fitfully of each other.