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Greek heroes mourn their unsung battles with inner monsters, while ordinary men find themselves suddenly lost at sea, in this richly patterned weave of classical mythology and everyday lives. Tom Sleigh, who has previously exhibited his genius of invention in Waking and The Chain, exacts precise emotion and hard-earned revelation in his latest collection of poetry, The Dreamhouse.
In The Dreamhouse, the souls of the dead haunt the living, and the souls of the living are haunted by questions of their own nature. But rather than clouding his meaning with generalities and assumptions, Sleigh leads you through the realm of his dreamhouse with unrelenting and unerring precision. Each poem in this collection is wrought with muscular intellect, taut metaphor, and language stripped bare and honed like an arrowhead. Welding contemporary realities to classical epics, Sleigh forges a uniquely modern metaphysical poetry and captures a solid, fiercely exact vision of themes and ideas that haunt most minds in only the vagaries of abstraction.
Sleigh introduces Greek mythology in refreshing and surprising ways, and roves hungrily and wildly through an epic of associations. But surprisingly, his ever-unwinding chains of thought always culminate in breathtakingly precise emotional truths. For Sleigh, a hospital room is an island of transformation, and blood cycling through a shunt in his dying father's arm is a voyage from the land of the living to the land of the dead, and back again. Inundated with metaphors of Odysseus at sea, a middle-aged man in a car finds "the radio tower/ above the quiet city beaming/ from its lone eye a voice sobsinging," transformed into a "disenchanted/ siren who sings you back into yourself."
Perhaps the greatest achievement of this fusion of classical and contemporary is in Sleigh's long poem "Heracles," which traces the muscle-bound Greek hero's path to immortality. Sleigh presents a Heracles of a divided nature, a hero in anguish -- tortured by his mortal image, wrestling with his poisoned spirit, and like many of Sleigh's voices, testing his own potential for salvation. He asks,
"Why am I like this? Make me something else --
more like an ordinary man."
But his divine half
answers:
"Feel the surge breaking in your brain?
That's the shoal where you've run aground.
Dare to be like others, and the god
in you will rise and drag you down."
But Sleigh's Heracles is more than a hero with an identity crisis. He is a man, suffering fear and despair in dark nights in motels, and in "His loneliness/ and awkwardness/ in trying to explain/ his suspicion/ that his pain/ is myth,/ mere myth." Ultimately, Heracles does find salvation, burning his body on a pyre to free his immortal soul. Sleigh describes Heracles's salvation as dissolution, pure trajectory in which "Before him the underworld/ shrinks to an arrow's tip, behind him his past bleeds into a vapor trail/ until he is nothing but the momentum he feels gathering/ as the bow bends and the tensing fingers curl."
None of the souls in The Dreamhouse are at rest. "Suffering souls, what do you ask of us?" Sleigh asks in "Transfusion." As in "Heracles," the other poems in this collection are populated by characters struggling with their own nature, and their distance from others. All are haunted or visited by ghosts and demons who appear as protean shape-shifters: demons who live in the fractured eyes of a fly on the dashboard, or the poet's father, reincarnated as a silent hummingbird who darts beyond his grasp (in a beautiful instance of assonance, Sleigh writes, "Your feather's breath/smokes along my cheek"). And as in all of Sleigh's work, his world is one seen through a sharp and emotional eye. Whether describing a man laying out castaway wares on a blanket in Boston in "The Grid," or a mentally ill woman he watches in "One Sunday," Sleigh is able to convey harsh truths with genuine and specific sympathy that never becomes sentimental.
Sleigh's language is musical, but he utilizes rhyme sparingly, choosing subtle assonance over a formal scheme. He is conscious of rhyme and a multitude of formal concerns, but he uses them to intensify or drive the emotional core or meaning of a poem, rather than to dictate its course.
Sleigh's mastery becomes most evident in the freedoms he takes with his poetry. Through subtle wordplay and linguistic invention, the lives he imagines can find their richest moments in paradox. Doors become barriers rather than passageways, and lovers challenge their own love, although they can plainly see the weakness of what holds them together. In a linguistically stunning poem, "The Bond," even "void replete with nullity" can pierce, for it speaks "inside the heart's openness/ And can never be forgotten once heard in extremity." He creates a distinct poetic logic to pinpoint exactly the otherwise indescribable:
"Moments of your voice that establish the words
That make up the bond unbreakable between us
That keeps on breaking no matter what we do,
The breaking the bond unbreakable between us."
In Sleigh's dreamhouse, anything is possible. His poetic imagination roams like a mariner who, seeing one object on a distant horizon, sails to it with the ferocity of madness through stormy seas. And as in dreams, the mind adrift near one isle always discovers yet another far horizon to which it must travel, in hope that the journey will bring it closer to what it seeks. For Tom Sleigh, and for the heroes of his poetry, the fitful dreaming always leads the lost soul at sea back to home.
—Elise Vogel
From the Publisher
In The Dreamhouse, Tom Sleigh's poetry is a medium for both revelation and linguistic invention. The meditative clarity of Sleigh's poems, his ability to range between the plain and high style with complete naturalness of intonation, and the varying and always surprising musical effects he accomplishes in each poem display his unequaled flair for innovation that is never willful or forced but which always works to forward the poems' emotional and intellectual resonances. The Dreamhouse marks Sleigh as one of the most inventive and provocative poets of his generation.
Praise for Tom Sleigh:
"Through sheer artistry, Tom Sleigh manages to write . . . in a transcendent way, and without appeal to the metaphysical assumptions transcendence usually requires. The Chain . . . floods darkness with brilliant craft."—Gray Jacobik, Boston Globe
"Tom Sleigh's second book of poems, Waking, is so fine one can hardly do justice to it in a review. . . . Sleigh is nearly as prodigal with his gifts as Yeats."—Liz Rosenberg, New York Times Book Review
Publishers Weekly
From Heracles and Horace to headlights and homelessness, Sleigh's raw and often-compelling fourth book of poetry builds on his familiar strengths: hard-chiseled lines and stanzas mix versions of Greek and Latin prayers and myths, contemporary confessional lyric and portraits of mentally ill urban wanderers whose persistence Sleigh pities and admires. An attentive 11-section sequence about the life, death and immortality of Heracles stands among Sleigh's best work: "Before him the underworld/ shrinks to an arrow's tip, behind him his past bleeds into a vapor trail/ until he is nothing but the momentum he feels gathering/ as the bow bends and the tensing fingers curl." Sleigh's Attic clarity adapts almost as well to the barroom and automobile as to the bow and arrow: in the guilt-ridden downtown of "The Grid," a man collapses on a sidewalk, "the police hoist him by his armpits and sockless ankles," and Sleigh reflects: "The waters wear the stones. My face is foul with weeping/ and on my eyelids is the shadow of death." As in previous books (Waking; The Chain) Sleigh can sound slightly like Thom Gunn, Frank Bidart or Robert Pinsky, though rarely like any one for the length of a poem. (As with Pinsky, simple clarity can become for him an end instead of a means.) Sleigh chooses the scarred over the polished, the unadorned over the elaborate, and the sublimely accurate over the beautiful. His most personal work, in a sequence of love poems and one about his late father, is paradoxically his least individuated: his "father's face/ quizzical, half-angry, pinched by death/ and then, at the end grown grave, calm" could be the face of many poets' parents, but Sleigh's tormented Greek heroes are his alone. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
In his fourth collection, Sleigh (Waking) continues his presentations of mood pieces, perhaps reminiscent of Wallace Stevens but with a deep-set anger and agitation that is purely contemporary. "Sunday Morning," in his view, presents not the tranquility of Stevens but a crazed bag lady in the park. She is not alone in her derangement: there will always be those "demons/ who slip in and out of us whatever our lives," as he warns in "To the Sun." All modern poets are taught to take note of every smallest happenstance around them, but Sleigh's powers of observation top any this reviewer has read, as in "Stillness," a dense, five-page poem describing an elderly poet climbing into the back seat of a Volkswagen. Nothing about these poems is direct, yet the digressions are so linguistically marvelous that, if it matters how he got from there to here, we simply read again. As a matter of fact, the complex yet brilliant poems in the second section, dealing with the death of Sleigh's father, require (and withstand) second and third readings. Two of Sleigh's previous books were reviewed in the New York Times; he's won NEA, Guggenheim, and Lila Wallace/ Reader's Digest grants, among others. Recommended everywhere poetry books are read.--Rochelle Ratner, formerly with "Soho Weekly News," New York Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
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