Unsleeping: Poems

by Michael Burkard

Reading Michael Burkard’s daring new poems is like using a highly sophisticated listening device to eavesdrop on the unconscious. The signal is clear, but what we are hearing is teasingly indeterminent. Burkard has done us the wild favor of removing the usual mediation between waking and dreaming. A melancholy and intensely lyrical voice leads us to the edge of what words can say, and we follow with curiosity and amazement. And then, somehow, the voice goes beyond what can be said. "Michael Burkard has over the years attracted a small but fanatical set of readers. I’m tempted to call him a cult figure, or a poet’s poet . . . he is a school of one . . . a poet whose forte is his hauntedness and his sorrowful expressive mystery. Burkard is a poet who should be read rather than explained, and in an era which our poets’ voices have grown benumbingly interchangeable and predictable, this quality makes Burkard all the more distinct."—David Wojahn in Poetry Unsleeping is Michael Burkard’s eighth collection of poetry. His previous book, Entire Dilemma was published by Sarabande books in 1998, and W.W. Norton published My Secret A Notebook of Prose and Poems in 1990. He has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and two grants from both the New York State Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at various colleges and universities, most recently Syracuse University, University of Louisville, and LeMoyne College. He lives in Syracuse, New York.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2001

About the author

He graduated from Hobart College and from the Iowa Writers' Workshop with an MFA in 1973. He taught at Kirkland College (1975–78) and Sarah Lawrence College (1983–84, 1986–87), and has taught in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University since 1997. He has been a visiting writer at New York University (1991) and the University of Louisville (1992, 1996), as well as a writer-in-residence at Austin Peay State University (1990). During the 1990s he has also worked as an alcoholism counselor, particularly with children whose lives have been impacted by alcoholism. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review,The Paris Review, Ploughshares, APR, Ironwood, and Quarterly West.

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe I want to stop,
to stop this, what has been going
on all these years, what sideways
sea or life am I trying to steer
clear of knowing how deeply it touched
me, how deeply it held me, how deeply
someone took me from this—

*

[…] Talking
is painful, but it feels sometimes as if that is all there ever was, that
it isn’t (is not) painful at all.

*

But I wanted to find a way back to you. Like the moon.
And this seemed as good as any.

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed entering this world of dream-like syntax and innuendo. Some of my favorite lines:

A fairy tale with a bridge leading to a penis?

Today's crisis is entitled "Sunlight."

When the remembering is a you against a you you do not recall.

One time he washed the moon and put it in his pocket.

Two blackbirds have more space than they can handle.

Things become is.

[jess sanford · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yeah, it's pretty awful.