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Tom Sleigh uses poems as pontoons
BY DAVID KIRBY
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Far Side of the Earth
By Tom Sleigh. Houghton Mifflin, 113 pages, $22.
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Since I’m neither suicidal nor addicted to anything stronger than my baby’s kisses, I’ve never bought the thesis that Edmund Wilson lays out in The Wound and the Bow about the serious artist needing serious problems, ones so grievous they might have to be medicated with a gas pipe or a river of booze. True, you have your Plaths and your Pollocks, but to insist that trouble is as necessary to the creative mind as a typewriter or a paintbrush is to overlook countless artists who cut the grass, pay the bills, and get the work done, even if they yell at the kids too much and suffer from the odd hangover. Yet I’m certain that artists feel a gap between themselves and their subjects - a love gone wrong, the nature of art itself - and that they all try to span that chasm with language or clay or guitar chords. And after reading the poems in Far Side of the Earth, with their reliance on words and phrases like "abyss," "precipice," and "ten thousand fathoms down," I’d say that Tom Sleigh too throws nouns and verbs in front of himself like an explorer laying down pontoons as he makes his way into the swamp’s dim center, toward the great and terrible things to be found there. In Sleigh’s previous collection, 1999’s The Dreamhouse, the keynote was propulsion; the poems sped toward answers like a teenager racing home so he could spend the night in his mom’s house rather than in jail. Here, the kid is older and more ruminative, and the poems are slow, cautious - they pause at every intersection. Answers are sought out rather than arrived at; the poems read like transcripts of a mind taking its time, one that brakes often and accelerates only when the cross streets are clear. The Romantics loved abysses too, and though as in The Dreamhouse Sleigh continues to draw on the Greek and Roman classics (his most recent book is a translation of Euripides’s Herakles), it’s hard not to read these poems and think of Coleridge, whose Kubla Khan builds a pleasure dome on a river that pours from a "deep romantic chasm," a "holy and enchanted" place. Or Keats, whose nightingale pours forth its song from a lightless niche in the wood. In "Vessel," the place is a backyard ditch: . . . an abyss where I hear a neighbor boy’s Voice cursing an exhilarated, out of its mind,
Unappeasably inventive flow of "Fuck fuck motherfuck" ecstasy that maybe He imagines the neighborhood can’t hear? More than once, Sleigh takes on Plato in these poems, rejecting the notion that our earthly lives are shadows on a cave wall and that something better awaits elsewhere. In "Day Room," he writes, "In the mind like the cave’s walls turning outside/Inside outside inside no end or difference inside out." What happens here and now is the point. You can slip into some narrow space and die, but you can also find new life there, which is why at least some of Poe’s heroes escape their premature burials and Wordsworth’s nuns fret not at their narrow convent rooms. What springs from the far side of Sleigh’s imagination isn’t always easily seen, though it’s invariably worth looking for. On occasion he’s guilty of poetizing, as when he begins "Tracks" with the line "Evanescent engine in its ether-housing." Most of the time, though, he draws thick outlines and lets us fill in the details. "The Fissure" begins: Your power to make me feel that I am I and none other dims like lights going Out room by room. Just to think of you can seem Ridiculous - a hopeless way of hoping So when I wake from a nap into amnesia For a moment, I imagine you sleeping Here beside me . . . at least till the abyss Opens next to my bed . . . The shapes that emerge from the dark recesses of the mind are almost always engaging. From time to time, they are downright startling, as when one of Sleigh’s speakers equates his mother with Oedipus, surely a first in both the poetic and the filial arenas. Too rarely, perhaps, the figures presented to us are drop-dead funny. The hero of "For Robert Owen Sleigh, P.F.C., 100th Division" trips and drops his rifle on the way to take a German soldier prisoner, whereupon his gentlemanly foe hands him back the weapon, first "turning the barrel/Toward his chest the way someone passing/A butter knife holds it out handle first." Mothers as mother-lovers, enemies as friends: these poems say there’s always something just ahead of us in the mist, something worth chasing even though we’ll probably never catch it. The artist’s wound is a product of Edmund Wilson’s imagination. Fortunately for art, the gap between the artist and the thing that’s driving him nuts is real.
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