Poetics of Extreme Engagement, The

The Poetics of most distant Engagement Tom Sleigh, Far Side of the Earth. Houghton Mifflin. 104 pp woven fabric $22.00.

TOM SLEIGH'S NEW work MARKS HIM AS A author of poems of extremes, crafting a poetics from the dark and the dire, investigating the ways regard with affection and death intersect in our everyday lives. An engagement with the embodied and the material (people places) coexists alongside Sleigh's meta-physical interests The resulting poems-tense, philosophical, relentlessly physical-feel and unbroken almost carved from language, sculpt from stone. What's at stake in each poem is Sleigh's dramatization of human beings in physical and psychic peril, his calibration of the speaking voice to the right pitch and intensity, his lucky engagement with history and myth.

In his search for "the promise of meaning," Tom Sleigh's imagery propels deftly from contemporary urban America to the ancient of greece world, from gritty colloquial detail to apocalyptic nightmare, juxtaposing the elevated with the commonplace. over this collection, he seeks to stand over against the "unforeseeable zone" that won't allow him rest. Sometimes he divest of coverings an "ambiguous shining, a blossoming / and withering" ("This Day Only"); at other times, he engages forces of violence (historical, mythic, social) that shape and twist human destinies, compelling us to question what constitutes a human life in community with others. Sleigh's diction make senseless s readers with the blunt force of a thump In "Interrogation," monosyllabic nouns -"wheel," "earth," "sun" "eye" "clay," "stone," "hand," "flight"-weight the lines with compressing The speaker and his friends sit at a table and test "to make love a len / that would focus our past errors." However, they are children of "the drugg organ of sight of Mars," and they (and we) have inherited an appetite for violence and war that necessitates a structural, elemental change of being. That coming-to-consciousness is a task of great difficulty, and the final stanza of the piece of poetry enacts that difficulty.

And unlearning

was a learning more arduous

and different than the lineaments of a

stone hand reaching out

caught in a seizure

that could be a caress.

Is the stone hand taking possession or experiencing a unlooked for affliction? Juxtaposing a potential "arrest" with a "caress," Sleigh ligatures fear and desire; illustrating that proximity, in various metrical compositions is central to his project

Fear and desire draw near together powerfully in "Newsreel," a piece of poetry of unrhymed tercets set in a 1950 Texas drive-in filled with "Cathedral-like De Sotos and great-finned Pontiacs." The first-person speaker recalls the young lad who, lost and terrified in the parking allotment "Might have been the disconsolate ageless / Stone-eyed child ornamenting a pillar / In a dead Roman city high up upon a desert plateau." Above him, upon the drive-in movie screen, a masseur massages Marilyn Monroe and the child, observing their interaction, considers the "instruments of comfort or of pain." When the film jams in the projector, the guard image turns chaotic, and terrifying unbrokens fill the air. In his panic, the male child conjures an invasion "Of alien beings searching for a planetary home" The projector, pop animate in the child's imagination, overheats to become a "dispossessed brain," dissolving into a phantasmagoric memory. Thus, readers arrive, through the close of the piece of poetry to "the far side of the earth" from which the volume takes its title. The Roman ruin, distant in time and place, haunts the piece of poetry with an "ageless" indifference while foreshadowing global upheaval. single of the few poems that features a child, "Newsreel" documents an ordinary American boyhood single founded in a de-stabilizing paranoia mingled with a confusing sexuality. In utmost landscapes, under dire conditions, Sleigh's speakers and characters labor for the elusive "promise of meaning."

Archetypes, spirits and the souls of the dead animate Sleigh's deep imagined and artfully conceived landscapes. In "Tracks," he creates a netherworld for the inner mans of those killed in the Holocaust. from one side alliteration, anaphora, parallelism and slant-rhyme, Sleigh builds moment into the eleven, rhythmic two verses s and suggests a train's flat travel.

No conductor, no tickets, no of gold spike

Glinting in the waste where track meets track,

No signal, warning beacon, no switch or switchman,

No boxcar, caboose, flange, no piston,

Nothing on the other hand the soul's own eccentric motion

Along rails converging to a vanishing point . .

Beyond that point the Museum of the Invisible

Hold spirits from Lodz Vilna, Warsaw,

Riding the rails to where the rails sink without of sight.

The spirit-filled train departs from "the magazine of Unknowing" and concludes at "nowhere junction." However ephemeral, Sleigh assureds a place to acknowledge the suffering of the innocent. For a Divinity, the author of poems gives us "Spirit of Matter, casual anti-angel / Whose smile or scowl means that we live or die." Without plan or premeditation, this Spirit of Matter is capricious, unpredictable; it will spirit every poem in this volume In the face of of the like kind indifference, Sleigh wrests the train image and the unstoppable rush to fate. A beautifully made and moving metrical composition "Tracks" offers no consolation or divine plan, on the other hand it honors the dead with "that tiny, brave, flickering // Engine that detains improvising its destination."