They Are Sleeping [Paperback]

Joanna Klink (Author)

Book Description

Series: The Contemporary Poetry Series | Publication Date: October 20, 2000

In They Are Sleeping, Joanna Klink tests the limits of solitude, setting her poems in places where our grip on “self” is loosened and blurred--caves, coastlines, rooms in cities. As her poems lead us through these sometimes beautiful, sometimes appalling internal landscapes, characters like the Hanged Man and the Lady of Situations reappear, often locked in misunderstanding but compelling us toward a more fragile and expansive sense of self.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"In Joanna Klink’s poems the limits of consciousness are constantly tried by the seductive enchantments of lyricism; clarity and mystery are not only brought close to each other, often they seem indistinguishable. Everywhere, a forceful, scrupulous intelligence is active—a luminous diction, a range of cadences. Everywhere, the burden of feeling is borne with ease."--Mark Strand, former Poet Laureate of the United States

"They Are Sleeping is . . . so rare for a first collection, with a moving and complex tension between its lines and sentences, an engaging kaleidoscopic sense of diction, and a form of sequence to which the reader awakens and re-awakens. . . . Joanna Klink invents a new mythology for those 'landscapes without particulars'—the unmarked natural spaces and cultural sites gone haywire—that separate what is American from what bears meaning over time."--Susan Stewart, author of The Forest

"Joanna Klink is a love poet. Love, like Tarot, is a game of chance where the stakes are souls. Under the sign of the Hanged Man—Le Pendu—true-love comes to pass. Crucified upside down like Saint Paul—hero of reversal—the love-visionary turns hazard and sacrifice into finding and benefit. The presence of such poetry makes everyone—all the persons whom its beauty touches—NEW. This is the finding of an unmistakable poet—her gift."--Allen Grossman, author of The Philosopher's Window

About the Author

Joanna Klink teaches at the University of Montana at Missoula. Her poems have appeared in the Antioch Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Verse, and Prairie Schooner.

Product Details

• Paperback: 88 pages
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press (October 20, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 082032275X
• ISBN-13: 978-0820322759
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.1 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: #933,964 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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8 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars hauntings and goings, June 13, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: They Are Sleeping (Paperback)

- The poems in this book are beautiful and strange and painful and far.
- Among other things, they bring together, in unexpected ways, echoes of both Eliot and Stevens, composing on this plane a suggestive conversation of a sort not often heard in the poetry of the last century (though heard in Ashbery). This is an agile gathering of echoes.
- Why would they be sleeping? How might they come to wake? Who are they anyway?
- They are us.
- A sleeping that is a kind of waking, poised on a threshold of heightened attention, a leaning on the edge of a vivid sleep, as Stevens once put it, is a romantic motif occasionally sounded in the book. A sleeping that is a kind of dying in life, a going on while dead, far from the glow of things, far from the source of abundance, a walking back and forth in the brown fog of an unreal city, as Eliot once evoked it, is a post-christian motif that appears to be predominant in the book. Persons move at a distance of miles from one another: isolated, darkened, withdrawn, afraid. They are sleeping? They are hurt. And yet there are reaches. The poems lend voice not only to a wounding isolation but also to a saving openness, tracing restorative crossings toward all that is there to be felt, heard, touched, addressed, as if the light of dawn behind us, quite lost as we find ourselves sleeping through life, were yet a light before us, to be discovered again in a life of passion and premonition. "Movement of bird, movement of light, movement of water." Patterned sweep of wing on water. Arc of air. Sleeping, yes, yet they are preparing to wake, leaning toward "birds of change" as toward hidden thrushes, departing words, that call through fog to another life, a life together perhaps, open and felt, other than the waste we've made of our lives dimly untogether. "And the veins of light casting over the pans, pulling out shadows / as we sleep in beds, white and lucent / as after September when the autumn rains come, they // will come, the birds of change / opening whatever they feel." So life alive is possible. How strange the thought. As if we had forgotten. Often, at its best, lyric poetry is voiced testimony, exactly measured, to the event of being alive. The patient indirections of these poems, working through the wrecks we make of ourselves, would go there: a place, unlikely, where, as we hear and turn, the widening misdirections of life begin again otherwise.
- Occasionally, in the various light, the various shadow, dawns are as evenings, evenings as dawns. The transitions are unscheduled. These voices in a world gone strange are hauntings and goings.