DP: When I read Songs for Isabella I'm reminded of Romeo and 
Juliet. The first poem, "Isabella's Body" has--for me--echoes of 
Romeo's "Arise, fair sun and kill the envious moon" but with the 
day/night relationship reversed. You long for night and she "brings 
the moon up full and naked./silences the sun". Did you have 
Shakespeare's play in mind and behind that ideas of the tradition of 
suites of love poems?

KN: I don't think I had Romeo and Juliet in mind in any foregrounded
way, though it was certainly lingering there in the background. I
was certainly thinking about the tradition of suites of love poems.

I was especially thinking about Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and 
A Song of Despair. I was thinking about that so much that I built my 
poems over the substructure of that, in a similar way to how Bowering 
used Rilke in composing his Kerrisdale Elegies. I would read Neruda's 
poems and write my poems on top of his. And there was a bit of a 
personal joke in that. Neruda, a Chilean, had taken his pen name from 
a Czech  writer, Jan Neruda. Now I was in love with a Czech woman, 
who was twenty-one, so I would write my twenty-one poems over 
the top of a love suite written by a Chilean with a Czech pen name. 
And I would turn the "song of despair" into a love poem too.
And obviously the "songs" in the title comes from the "song of 
despair."  I was also trying to write, in a serious way, about that 
older man--younger woman love affair. That was different from 
Neruda. Neruda was a young man writing about a young love. 
I think he was nineteen or twenty when he wrote that book. 
The woman I was in love with was around the same age as 
Neruda's lover had been, but the poet was a lot older. 
That makes it quite different from the Romeo and Juliet  situation as well.

DP:When I read this book the word "nocturne" came to mind.
Is it a night suite?

KN: I don't think I consciously set out to write a nocturne, 
but I think it's perfectly reasonable to see it that way. Night certainly 
predominates. Other times of day are referred to, and sometimes 
written about, but probably three-quarters of the poems have 
a nighttime setting. The poem in the "song of despair" slot is 
called "Last Morning" and is about the nights ending, the end of 
the affair. Daylight sends us back to our separated lives. Night 
is celebrated as the time of lovers, and that's  pretty traditional, as is, 
I think, my identifying Isabella with the moon.