Customer Reviews

They Are Sleeping

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- 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 Persons move at a distance of miles from one another: isolated, darkened, withdrawn, afraid.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.