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.

Given the poems' refusal of traditional prosody, it may seem that "subject matter" is beside the point. But from another point of view these poems can be read as filled with urgent and unusual "subjects." They are, for example, an exploration of the taboo eroticism implicit in familial naming: "father," "brother," "mother," "sister," and the doomed reaching implicit in this taboo.

Postcards, paintings, proper names or initials of friends and writers, animals, trains, houses, the sea and moon-all float through the word in Chagall-like, dreamlike slow motion, as if spread out across the night sky, to form tantalizing new constellations. These are poems that cannot be "gotten" via analysis; they are intuitive visions the reader must come to intuitively. Like fragmentary signposts-ambiguously aimed, with missing letters-they nevertheless point the reader toward her own visionary apprehension of the world, a world not split in two, but spirit and matter at once.

Read

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Hat Angel

What could she say? Little money,
little chance for work, a drunk for
a husband she no longer loved,
and now she leaves her winter hat
on the train. Trains feel vast.
Devon's room-not so vast. But it
doesn't move, so she's sitting
there before he comes home smashed
and angry, or maybe he will just
fall down. She reads a few pages
of a book half-backwards. A
hopeless attempt to snap to, to
have something in this life pull
her out of this, like the moon,
the moon's a puller. Like the train:
the train's a puller of forgetfulness
and power and destination far into
the reaches of the forests. What
could she say? Oh she can talk to
herself, but now she's got to get
out, and words won't do this. Al-
most as if words make you stay more.
She doesn't even have a hat to reach
for so can she make the door? Oh
prayer for the hat to be a puller
for her even as it circles the city
or enters someone else's flat, hat
have an arm to keep her from his fist,
moon and train, moon and train, moon
and train: pull her, pull her, pull her.

Blurbs

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"Unsleeping is a beautiful, complex work."

—Robert Creeley

Interested in seeing Michael Burkard read from his book? His current author tour schedule is posted online.

"In Burkard's treatment, however, dreams are not abstractions, and 'unsleeping' is not the same as 'wakeful.' As in paintings by Magritte or de Chirico, poems come to life here in the details, in the everyday objects in odd juxtaposition. Images repeat with slight variations, one theme or idea morphing into the next. They become mesmerizing, like mantras, rituals, fetishistic dances, compulsions. . . . a connection to Burkard's work, once established, is worth the effort expended."

—Kirkus Reviews

"In Burkard's intensely psychological poetry, 'unsleeping' refers to a dreamy state of semi-consciousness when one is 'not quite sleeping yet.' The lines take the form of conundrums or metaphysical transcriptions that at times sound like epigrams from Heidegger or Wittgenstein."

—Library Journal