Space Walk (Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award) [Hardcover]

Tom Sleigh (Author)

Book Description

Series: Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award | Publication Date: March 23, 2007

Space Walk blasts off into realms of experience that show the imagination’s limitless capacity to be both brutal and uplifting. While many of the poems in this daring collection confront head-on our current American realities of empire, state violence, the endless “crisis-chatter” of talking heads, and the eerie, weightless feeling of impending catastrophe, they are tethered to the gravitational pull of love and hope.

In Tom Sleigh’s poems, rocket engines and pancake houses, space stations and mom’s kitchen, terrorist organizations and Sundays in a museum are all part of love’s intergalactic amplitude. As the poet writes in “After Netzsche”: “In the face that must conceal / what is necessary / to bear / love appears in the face / of the face of what is necessary.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Sleigh (The Far Side of the Earth) has slowly, and justly, won a reputation for his clean-lined, sinewy poems about tough men, wounded bodies and all the forms of strength—intellectual, moral, aural, physical, emotional. His seventh book of verse is not his most striking, but may be his saddest and most humane. Stanzas about Homeric violence, and about its modern counterparts, frame understated, nearly tearful depictions of troubled lovers (gay and straight), grieving survivors and the last days of the poet's father, "moving with the clumsy gestures/ Of a man in a space suit—the strangeness of death/ Moving among the living." A Gerhardt Richter painting conjures reincarnations of Hercules, compelled by mean gods to "the fate he must fulfill, slaughtering/ with his club whatever comes into his way"; drag shows suggest obituaries; radio broadcasts look forward to the Earth's end; and the Middle East, ancient and modern, echoes with emblems of oblivion: "We will be covered by the dune,/ and uncovered in time." Body and mind, for Sleigh, must die together, and their mutual sadness, incomprehension and struggle generates each poem. This serious focus, the well-managed ancient Greek analogues and the wrung-out credibility of the best stanzas belong to nobody but Sleigh. (Mar.)
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Review

"For the reader, it is thrilling to overhear a writer pushing into greatness." (Philip Levine, Ploughshares )

"Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I greatly admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet schieves a sense of lyric absolution." (Seamus Heaney ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 112 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; None edition (March 23, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618684247
• ISBN-13: 978-0618684243
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,498,930 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fine book of new poetry, November 8, 2007

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This review is from: Space Walk (Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award) (Hardcover)

Tom Sleigh is one of the best poets today. This is a book of great emotional power, one that examines, in an understated way, the primal experiences of being part of an aggressive, weightless nation, as well as the releases into the weightlessness of smaller scaled losses. He is a poet who balances the claims of other people, intellectual and emotional responsibility, against the delights of art. There are poems here that ride with seeming effortlessness upon cunning Metaphysical turns--a smiling quality. And he is the master of the extended sequence poems, in poems like "Ice Trucker Pilgrimage: A Libretto." He has discovered something new and inherently theatrical in the form of the sequence in his work. I would read this together with "The Far Side of the Earth," and seek out "Bula Matari/Smasher of Rocks," another "theater piece" sequence of his that appeared in a short-lived journal of longer poems called "At Length" and also as a chapbook.