Customer Reviews

Sleeping with the Dead

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Bill Ehrhart makes his readers confront their morality, that's right, morality . Many poets are into using poetry to get us to look at mortality. I think it is how they scare off the Mr. Death that hovers over their shoulder or in their closets. "Look, you readers, we are all in this thing and we will not get out alive. Did I say we, Ah yes! Well misery loves company." But not Ehrhart he has faced the reaper and seen him in the mirror and in the faces of his fellows. His acceptance of his own mortality allows him to use it as a tool to test the justice of our actions. He asks us to look at what we do to fellow humans, our poor fellows, our weaker fellows, our unfortunate fellows. He calls us to account with specifics. So his poetry is uncomfortable stuff. He has a fierce anger. The irony is that this most public poet is at his very best when he is private. Other reviews quote the title poem. Perhaps the most personal and the most fragile and mesmerizing in this chapbook. Which by the way is a wonderful piece of the bookmaker's art. I am pleased to have added it to my library.

Sleeping With The Dead is a timeless and memorable collection of W. D. Ehrhart's poetry. Filled from first page to last with Ehrhart's remarkable style and progressive poetic resonance, Sleeping With The Dead is an twenty-four page, handsewn, elegant, showcased presentation. Sleeping With The Dead-- I dreamed about you again last night./This time, you were living in Tennessee,/on a horse farm, married, children/I think, it wasn't clear--but I finally/got you to see that I don't love you,/not like that: as if my world would end/without you in it.//O, to have been/so close, to have shared your bed, to have/felt like I'd been raised from the dead/after all those dead I slept with/every night. It almost drove me mad/to let you go.//But that was years ago,/married nineteen years and sorry only/that I've never had the chance to tell you/that it's okay, that I'm okay,/that no one could have saved me then,/not you or God, that I don't love you/anymore, but hope someone does.

In these essential, heartbreaking poems, W.D. Ehrhart reveals the underbelly of these dark days. He takes us to Vietnam, to Kosovo, to September 11, to Columbine. He refuses to turn away from hopelessness, from violence, from injustice and hypocrisy. These are, yes, political poems, but they're also gorgeous and literary and they do what the best art does. They show us the truth about ourselves, our world, and what it means to be human. In Ehrhart's refusal to turn away from darkness, he brings light. As he goes deeper into hopelessness, he finds hope. When it seems as if there is no way to go on, he goes on. Just look at these lines from the title poem: "here I am / married nineteen years and sorry only / that I've never had the chance to tell you / that it's okay, that I'm okay, / that no one could have saved me then, / not you nor God, that I don't love you / anymore, but hope that someone does." William Carlos Williams once said: "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." Ehrhart's poems bring us both the news and the heart, the facts of the world and the emotional, spiritual insights that just might help us all go on.