Conversations During Sleep - Softcover

Michele Wolf

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0938078569 ISBN 13: 9780938078562

Publisher: Anhinga Press, 1998

Synopsis

Poetry. "CONVERSATIONS DURING SLEEP feels like a logbook of gutsy revelations, transporting us to a territory both ethereal and earthy. We care about the lives that nudge us awake in this dark luminosity, a heartfelt journey we don't want to miss" -Yusef Komunyakaa.

About this title

About the Author:

Michele Wolf is magazine writer and editor living in New York

Review:

"The narrative poems of Michele Wolf's Conversations During Sleep illustrate themes of birth, aging, death, first love, and later love. Winner of the 1997 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, the volume is composed in quiet rhythms.

. . . Wolf has the capacity for elegant lines. In "Man With Picture Frame," which begins "We almost missed him, although his face,/As blunt as a busy Picasso, all shifting/Planes, was wedged in a picture frame," Wolf evokes the various senses and gestures toward aspects of humanity that are not easily described. The end of the poem arrives at that ineffability: "'Spare any change?' he asked. I brought/Forth a quarter. His eyes, brilliant, said/I am a masterpiece. This is where I live." -- Bostonia, Fall 1998

"Wolf's debut collection. From walks in the "Healing Dirt"... to trails through "Everglades and Mangoes," this... poet gets around." -- Publishers Weekly, August 31, 1998

As its title suggests, in this collection Ms. Wolf explores the place where sleep and waking intersect. This is the realm of Poe, but also of Jung-a realm of danger but also of healing. It is in this place, Ms. Wolf believes, that language and reality meet. In these poems, the poet-dreamer can cope with the harshness of reality, can comprehend the morass of experience and put it into language. This act saves the poet and makes life livable.

Wolf loves the ambiguity of sleep and waking and of language. Is the speaker of the poem real? Did the event actually happen? By pouring myth and the unconscious into the mix, Wolf creates a fictive reality in which the questions have multiple answers. As she says in "Solved in Sleep": "I am covered. What/I need to know is/Dense, pliant, dark."

Whatever answers there are will come to us when we are not grasping. Winner of the 1997 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, this volume introduces a warm and inventive voice. -- Independent Publisher, November/December 1998

Conversations During Sleep is Michele Wolf's debut book, but it has none of the raw feel of a typical first book; substantial as it is, it might almost be taken for a "new and selected." . . .

These closely observed and emotionally resonant poems range over the art world, family, relationships, world events-the life they present is one lived with attention and empathy. "The Blind Spot" (a searing rape poem) and a series of poems on Jewish themes enrich the volume, but its real center is in personal and familial relationships. The figure of the poet's dead sister haunts a number of poems, a "beautiful swimmer,/Drowned not by a watery absence of air/But by blood in the brain."

The other dominant motif, as the title suggests, is the dream life and what it might have to tell us. One poems insists that it is all "Solved in Sleep," that "What/I need to know is/Dense, pliant, dark." Another muses that "Lovemaking is private, true, but/It's not sleep, the deepest secret of all." Wolf wonders if her lover will "Understand [her] need to speak in the dark"; those of us who are drawn to read poems will understand that need all too well. The lucid, passionate poems that Wolf speaks out of her darkness are a welcome contribution to the words that pass among us. -- ForeWord, July 1998

About this edition

• Publisher: Anhinga Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0938078569
• ISBN 13: 9780938078562
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 75