My Life Asleep (Oxford Poets) Book

The title of Jo Shapcott's new collection, My Life Asleep, suggests a certain intimacy-- a wishful waywardness--to be discovered through a reading of her poems. If poems have often been compared to dreams--one of the more striking pieces included here, "Delectable Creatures", borrows its title from Auden's tribute to that great thinker of dreams, Sigmund Freud-- then there may be a privileged connection between what we do, or who we are, when we are asleep and the imagining which takes place through writing. In "Thetis", for example, "I" is the sea goddess, "raped until I bleed from my eyes", while the reader, "you", becomes a voyeur, spectator of the self-to-self intimacy--the exhibition of a self thinking through the legacy of poetry: Rilke, Enzensberger, Tsvetaeva--which seems to characterise this collection. "Lean forward and put a finger / on the spot you think the dream is": that's the invitation, but not the only one. Shapcott's work has received warm critical acclaim for its "extraordinary range and dexterity" (Jane Satterfield), and offerings like "War and Peace", "The Mad Cow in Space", "A Letter to Dennis"--"Silicosis. England. Land of phlegm / and stereophonic gobbing"--shift the register, playing on that less familiar aspect of a life asleep: the dream, and nightmare, of Englishness and its poetry. --Vicky LebeauRead More