Sleepwalker at Sea
The poems in "The Sleepwalker at Sea" tread a fluid line between dream and wakefulness, memory and loss, presence and longing. Leave a house and it suddenly fills with "the unseen"; consult "The Book of Clues" and discover only 'ghostly hints' of a self you've left behind. Linked by their restless displacement, pacing haunted spaces, these are poems that question what it means to be in the world and seek answers in lost rooms, missing sketches, disappearing fragments.
By turns meditative and playful, romantic and philosophical, "The Sleepwalker at Sea" strides an invisible path through streets of strangers, in search of ruined altars, buried candles, and "the whispering galleries of the dead". Here, deer "dissolve / into a tapestry of mist", a butterfly "measures / the universe's weight", and the soul "sculpts itself in frostlit air".
By turns meditative and playful, romantic and philosophical, "The Sleepwalker at Sea" strides an invisible path through streets of strangers, in search of ruined altars, buried candles, and "the whispering galleries of the dead". Here, deer "dissolve / into a tapestry of mist", a butterfly "measures / the universe's weight", and the soul "sculpts itself in frostlit air".
About the author
Kelly Grovier was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and educated at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his doctorate from Oxford University in 2005 after being awarded a British Marshall Scholarship. Co-founder of the scholarly journal "European Romantic Review", he is a regular contributor to the "Times Literary Supplement" and the "Observer". He has written widely on the Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Keats, and his biography of London's notorious Newgate prison will be published by John Murray (Hodder) in 2008. In 2004 he was appointed Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. His first Carcanet / OxfordPoets collection "A Lens in the Palm" was published in 2008.