Under Sleep (Phoenix Poets)

Hall, Daniel

ISBN 10: 0226313328 / ISBN 13: 9780226313320

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2007

About this Item

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Seller Inventory # ZEV.0226313328.VG

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Under Sleep (Phoenix Poets)
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226313328
• ISBN 13: 9780226313320
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: very_good

About this title

Synopsis

Then

You looked up vaguely

or you didn’t—even the memory

is dying. Then you whole body

breathed out, and the argument ended.

Heaven surfaced about you

like a glass tabletop, hard

and cold. Whatever you do

 

don’t turn me into poetry. Sorry:

I am done crying about it

but I am not done crying.

An extended meditation on how death affects those left behind, Under Sleep is a skillfully understated, beautifully rendered elegy for the poet’s partner. Formally inventive and technically sophisticated, Daniel Hall attends to the power of death to haunt every perception. The poet’s voice registers as though he were walking on the bottom of the ocean, in a state of mind somewhere “under sleep,” in a kind of waking dream. In Hall’s hands, isolated moments of perception bloom into truly touching love elegies.

The poems in Under Sleep were written over a period of ten years and, as a result, are densely interconnected, with lines and entire stanzas transplanted between different poems. Using styles ranging from free verse to sonnets, Sapphics, and rhymed haikus, Hall populates the book with literary and historical figures—Baudelaire, Pound, and Casanova—in poems set in China, the Middle East, Death Valley, and Italy. Throughout, the poetry is propelled by tension as the speaker struggles with his own better judgment—and against his lover’s wishes—to turn the loss of the beloved into art.

Praise for Daniel Hall

“Daniel Hall’s work reminds us that a poet’s sharp-sightedness, the whole business of ‘getting things right,’ is a matter of far more than accuracy. It’s a matter of—inescapably—thanksgiving.”—Brad Leithauser, New York Review of Books

About the Author

Daniel Hall is writer-in-residence at Amherst College and the author of two books of poetry, Hermit with Landscape and Strange Relation.