About the Author:
TOM SLEIGH is the author of seven collections of poetry. He has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lila Wallace Fund, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and numerous awards, including the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Award and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently teaches in the creative writing program at Hunter College in New York and resides in Brooklyn.
From Publishers Weekly:
Salt--salt of the earth and sea, the salt of tears--it symbolizes transformation in Sleigh's ( After One ) latest volume of poetry , functioning in two distinct phases: in solution and out. Dissolved, salt maintains life; precipitated, it fixes the secret of life and death in a crystalline structure. Sleigh's poems, too, flow along the surface of observation and end with insight, yet they remain merely technical exercises. "In June," a poem that takes place on a beach, is a good example: watching his lover "lie in the shallows," then "Dive and dissolve/ Into a wave," the speaker wonders why there remains between them a lingering distance--"I love you but . . . !" The last line tells him; he watches his lover sleeping--"Then your sleeping breath unmoored, an island drifting." Waking is about this drifting feeling, floating in the heavy atmosphere of experience, that accompanies independence yet reveals an abject ignorance of the self. For all his lofty content and mystical imagery, Sleigh doesn't take g many formal risks or attempt to expand his perceptions into a coherent expression of beliefs.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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