Sleep Not Sleep
by Harvey Ellis
Wow! Lovely. Stark. Rich. Strange. I’d say these poems spy out the mind’s quickest turns and flights and falls. They are comprehensively alert in the present of their making, even as they range widely in subject matter.
– Li-young Lee
Way too many words are used these days which is why it’s a pleasure to find someone who observes the presence of each word in a highly singular fashion. Harvey Ellis is masterful in Sleep Not Sleep to let this kind of singularity fill each word with a greater impact. It truly allows the reader to be involved not as an observer but as an active participant in a highly rapturous moment, a moment of discovering the unknown. Like all reality, this moment is filled with more space than words, more absence than presence, and it is just this absence that Ellis begins to speak with only the slightest of sounds. That’s why, if you’re a good listener, you can’t help but hear your own self coming alive.
– Paul Roth, poet, editor The Bitter Oleander
poems from sleep not sleep
ancestors
my ancestors surround me
like walls of a canyon
quiet
stone hard
their ideas drift over me
like breezes at sunset
we gather sticks
and make settlements
what we do is only partly
our own
and partly continuation
down through the chromosomes
my son
my baby sleeps behind me
stirring in the night
for the touch
that lets him continue
he is arranging
in his small form the furniture
and windows of his home
it will be a lot like mine
it will be a lot like theirs
This poem, “ancestors,” was read by Garrison Keillor on his NPR program “The Writer’s Almanac” in October of 2009 which inspired the above image in response from Do Palma, a quilt artist living in Wyoming.
the round threshold