BOOKS
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imagination's visions and dreams creates a friction point where desire and
fear, as well as our wish for a life of passionate intensity, start their slow
smolder.
The consequence of the "imagined blaze" is the subject of "Ending,"
a long, haunting dramatic monologue in which the speaker explains how
his wish for some unbearable difficulty and suffering becomes, in the form
of an incurable illness, not only true but the defining condition of his life.
Sleigh writes, "What I wished for -/ that my life would be a hook and
the hook a paradigm/ Of suffering I could not escape, suffering/ Whose
knowledge would be impossible to bear/ Even as I braced and kept brac–
ing/ To bear it - had been granted."
Like Dante, who dramatized his encounters with the inhabitants of
the Christian afterlife, Sleigh, throughout
Waking,
allows the dead and the
living of his own milieu to bear witness to their fate. These various ac–
counts remind us of the "hook" and how it is seemingly granted to us by
an irrepressible act of will. In the poem "M. on Her Thirtieth Birthday,"
a woman recalls her childhood desire for her parents' death and the eerie
absence and freedom she felt one day, when her parents were out of the
house, and she played the piano in a manner they would disapprove of
" - what I mean is that I was sure/ They would have punished me, just a
lot ofjangle
,I/
No tune or anything to steer by ..
.I
Now both of them
are dead, Father ten years/ Mother twenty. I guess that's what it means to
bel Grown up, to know you wished them gone, and now they are."
The Larkinesque ending of this poem is typical of the chilling effects
Sleigh is able to produce. He is a consummate stylist whose formal control
and exploitation of convention is graceful and calm. And yet it is from the
calm and steady control that some of Sleigh's most emotionally powerful
moments are achieved. The chorus of the last stanza of "Don't Go to the
Bam" warns Sleigh's mother of the dark psychic danger that waits for her
not only in the bam but inside her own body, which has been "axed" by
volts from electroshock therapy. Sleigh's formal characteristics remind me
most of John Peck's in
Shagbark,
though Sleigh's are more emotionally
and psychically revealing than Peck's poems.
Waking
is one of the strongest collections of poems to appear in the
last few years. The final poems, which deal directly with Sleigh's family,
are, in my opinion, some of the best poems of the decade; in their inten–
sity they echo Roethke's greenhouse poems. But perhaps where Sleigh is
strongest is in his ability to see the implication of his poems to their end.
The speaker in "Ending" arrives at a kind of acceptance and understand–
ing of his illness, his fate, as he discovers a parallel for his life in a self–
portrait by Bonnard: "was it fate to paint/ His own death," he writes, "his
skill at seeing/ Turned on himself, his luck indistinguishable/ From his
