rev. of Waking by Tom Sleigh

Tom Sleigh's new book is introduced by the title poem, his translation from Dante's "Purgatorio," in which the speaker wakes from a dream of his own destruction. The brilliant long poem which follows it, "Endings," is a ranging philosophical narrative whose speaker has received a deadly medical prognosis and wills himself to penetrate and renew his life. The poem begins with an admission that the poet had longed for suffering, for a "hook": "Until then I had loathed / My safety -- " Then he takes on the spiritual task of facing life without safety; the blow to youth's sense of immortality has been irrevocably struck.

Taking place primarily in the "unlivable Eden" of his mother's garden, a place of claustrophobic lushness (one thinks of Marvell's "luscious life" become a kind of Hell), "Endings" moves in memory to the hospital, to the senility and death of a loved aunt, to a late Bonnard self-portrait: ". . . his gaze / Comprehends his own impending death, the deaths of his family / And oldest friends -- " with the mother's voice entering and reentering his meditation. There are references throughout the poem -- and others in the book -- to the speaker observing himself, his reflection in mirrors, windows, in another's eyes, his skeletal X-ray image, descriptions that are shattering in their objectivity, their transparency, their near-disassociation from the feeling self. (And a refrain, almost homonymic with "mirror," of a patient who has stabbed herself and begs to be allowed to "
morir.")

This great poem informs those which follow, poems of love, family, and the political and social world. It is unsparing work, rich in the best sense, at once lyrical, relentless, and wise.       --
Gail Mazur