Sleeping and Waking

by Michael O'Brien

Poetry. SLEEPING AND WAKING moves between states of consciousness and the phenomenal world, finding reciprocities among sleep, dreams, weather, and urban signs. O'Brien's curiosity gets drawn to the edges of everyday life, rendering each local event with concision and exactitude. His poems offer what Ezra Pound calls "luminous details" in glimpsed gestures or overheard vernacular, full of the flaneur's alert attention.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2007

About the author

Michael O'Brien was an American poet.

Reviews

[Edna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I seldom read a book of poetry in one sitting but this I did in two ..I got the feel of the older Chinese poets. He spoke to me.

[Amanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5, but closer to 2 than 1. I don't dislike it that much. I just didn't find myself very moved by it. Except for "What She Does" which is 19 lines I could just swim in blissfully for a while. I was surprised to stumble into delightful love with the whole thing when I hadn't loved, especially, any certain line in the 39 pages leading up to it. I do appreciate the diamond in my rough, that lingers in my mind as I well and truly close the covers and continue to move on through other things.

[Stephanie]

I liked the extreme spareness of the poems, and their focus on liminality rather than some kind of autobiographical material. He has a fondness for line breaks after the word "the," which was strange at first, and the longer poems lost me. My favorite poems were less compressed and obscure, less characteristic of his work, really--perhaps that's no surprise--but they are really, really good.

[Steve]

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/...

[hh · Rating 4 out of 5]

liked the language here a lot - every poem felt very fresh. o'brien handles a wealth of subject matter with a deft light touch.