Space Walk

by Tom Sleigh

Space Walk blasts off into realms of experience that show the imagination’s limitless capacity to be both brutal and uplifting. While many of the poems in this daring collection confront head-on our current American realities of empire, state violence, the endless “crisis-chatter” of talking heads, and the eerie, weightless feeling of impending catastrophe, they are tethered to the gravitational pull of love and hope.

In Tom Sleigh’s poems, rocket engines and pancake houses, space stations and mom’s kitchen, terrorist organizations and Sundays in a museum are all part of love’s intergalactic amplitude. As the poet writes in “After Netzsche”: “In the face that must conceal / what is necessary / to bear / love appears in the face / of the face of what is necessary.”

Genres: Poetry

101 pages, Hardcover

First published March 23, 2007

About the author

Tom Sleigh is the author of seven poetry collections, including Space Walk, which received the 2008 Kingsley Tufts Award. He is also a playwright, translator, and the author of a collection of essays, Interview with a Ghost. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This guy taught a class I was in at the 2009 Writers @ Work conference in Park City (a great conference in a lovely venue, if you're into that kind of thing). He's the best poetry teacher I ever had, and I've had a few great ones (Stephen Dobyns, Stephen Dunn, etc.). He could take any mediocre poem and pare it down to something fresh and evocative. His poem "The Mouth" (after a painting by Gerhardt Richter) opens, "The mouth was open and we stared into it-- / what could we do about it, how could we stop staring?" I think the poem would have been better without "after a painting..." following the title. But still. The image is powerful, considering our helpless state of staring into the mouth of the world--a mouth that could eat us, tongue us, tell us horrible secrets. He describes the mouth as "saying fuck you to the viewer, fuck you, stay away, / like someone fearful of being struc or worse..." Sleigh is often playful, lighthearted, but he feels the dread we're all subject to. His lines always play with shifts--of light, of tone, of thought. In "The Flood," "Wave on wave on wave drowns the bedroom. // Waterlights play across our faces. / The fathoms above us unwaveringly clear, almost to radiance, // while below us, the sea keeps shelvin down and down / to a bottomless blackness out of which a voice / speaks in compassionate, level tones..."

I mentioned in class he has perfectly manicured fingernails and I don't think he was happy about that comment. I kept thinking I'd see clay in his fingers, and choppy nails like those of a sculptor, so I was surprised everytime I watched his hand float around from gesture to gesture with these long clean even healthy fingernails. In this respect--the floating, the cleanliness, the perfection of curve--he reminded me of Stephen Dobyns. Anyway. Anyone notice that male poets and writers tend to have such perfect fingernails? My own...oh, what a mess they are. A mess, a mess.

[Ebony Haight · Rating 3 out of 5]

Song Beyond Reason

The air's blank September heat
breathes into my window,
summer revives
in the massed green heads
of the waiting trees, waiting to write in leaves
their technicolor epitaphs,
brittle, wheezy sayings
rattling in the breeze.
All summer's the season
when love,
beyond reason, flourished
and failed, failed and refined itself
to golden
Scotch floating two rocks melting in the glass.
No matter how close love comes,
no matter
how we move away from love
to understand
the terms September imposes and demands,
the heavens don't sanction
our onanistic spacewalks
out among the genitalia of the stars.
Summer gave our hands to others
so that giving
became a wound you studied
as its scholar--
and then the scar takes love's place.
Summer fantasy
rules night and day--and it isn't empty--
though absurd to think the trees
have shadowy thoughts,
the un-ironic trees
meditating happiness, unhappiness,
the jeweled, insectile
loves, hates, the tyrant needs...
All summer is the season someone looked
at you, wanted you, and you felt the too giddy
fullness
of a balloon rising in the air,
swelling to a knowledge of remorseless paradise,
not knowing it must burst,
fall back to earth
a rag.
All summer was the season
beyond dread or reason
of happiness others
speak of sometimes, though maybe a little ironically,
not wanting to jinx it by naming it,
not wanting the prospect of air
thinning into
air to dry up
like spit or sperm or sweat.

[Donna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting, worthwhile read. In it, Sleigh plays with classical references and space exploration images to explore everyday life, setting today's events into a larger context of time and space. I liked some of his poems quite a lot (e.g. "Flood," "Archaic characters," "Lullaby." However, as collection, Space Walk did not "knock my socks" off. It was a solid, readable, and technically sound work.

[Tara · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book to learn from; it's a wonderful book in terms of technique. Also, if you like poems that you can peel apart, re-visit, and try to unpack, then this is for you. I tend to enjoy poetry that is more accessible, so this isn't one of my favorites. I really enjoyed the poems after the Iliad and Herodotus - and the Richter painting - but the others didn't really touch me emotionally in any real sense, although most explored painful human experiences like a parent's death.

[bethanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is absolutely incredible. I love the commmon themes and wordplay that intersect this collection of poems.

[DilanAc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mysterious, haunting poems. I think that this is a major talent at work.

[A. · Rating 1 out of 5]

This just did not do it for me.