Light Sleeper

by Coleman Stevenson

Light Sleeper is a collection of poems by Coleman Stevenson, author of Breakfast: 43 Poems and The Accidental Rarefication of Pattern #5609.

143 pages, Paperback

First published September 17, 2020

Reviews

[Ariel Kusby · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is so much to relate to in these poems—meditations on solitude and desire, but what may perhaps resonate most deeply are the details left unsaid. Skillful leaps between images celebrate mystery, encouraging us to remain open and free-associate, rather than linger on any objective ideas about human experience. This book is full of secrets, doors to shadowy places, and invitations to go deeper. It is a call to inhabit the liminal.

[avonlea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Existing somewhere between a grimoire and a naturalist’s most intimate diary, “Light Sleeper” is a profound and scintillating interior journey from a singular, alchemical mind. Prone to lists, fragments, scraps of memory, the poems in this collection become a kind of inventory, a still-life of a curio cabinet, complete with “dark peel of fruit and webbed wings of bats”. The speaker asks “What did I want to be: record keeper or dreamer?” — and the book is both: “From here I can cast my aethereal line / and I can lengthen my gaze like an antenna / to the depths”. This speaker across these poems is ever-curious, restless with pondering and musing, mercurial as sea air. The poems look backward and forward and inward— intent on capturing the comings-and-goings of mystery in all of life, large and small. The poems move seamlessly between the vast and the intimate, limning the correspondences between cosmic and domestic: “In that grave, a body treated with lime/ gives off a blue-white light when it heats /as elements must have long ago /when burning to life in the cores of stars.” Ever the naturalist, this speaker includes herself as subject, doubling the self to be both removed observer and the afflicted object observed.



There is as much constructed in the leaps between images as in the words themselves — silence is a web that catches & glimmers, the part of the magic act where the magician lays the white cloth over the hat. Between the lines is the constant, aching enormity of loss and ruin: lost childhood, the dissolution of relationship, the ruins of love, the impossible search for belonging by a mind that is in the throes of transformation and dare I say larger and more intelligent than (but still vulnerable to) the brutal enigma of human love. This book is utterly electric in its connections, in its breadth and intimacy, gut-wrenching and full of secrets. It unfurls with a naturalist’s precision. It’s marvelous.



Merged review:

Existing somewhere between a grimoire and a naturalist’s most intimate diary, “Light Sleeper” is a profound and scintillating interior journey from a singular, alchemical mind. Prone to lists, fragments, scraps of memory, the poems in this collection become a kind of inventory, a still-life of a curio cabinet, complete with “dark peel of fruit and webbed wings of bats”. The speaker asks “What did I want to be: record keeper or dreamer?” — and the book is both: “From here I can cast my aethereal line / and I can lengthen my gaze like an antenna / to the depths”. This speaker across these poems is ever-curious, restless with pondering and musing, mercurial as sea air. The poems look backward and forward and inward— intent on capturing the comings-and-goings of mystery in all of life, large and small. The poems move seamlessly between the vast and the intimate, limning the correspondences between cosmic and domestic: “In that grave, a body treated with lime/ gives off a blue-white light when it heats /as elements must have long ago /when burning to life in the cores of stars.” Ever the naturalist, this speaker includes herself as subject, doubling the self to be both removed observer and the afflicted object observed.

There is as much constructed in the leaps between images as in the words themselves — silence is a web that catches & glimmers, the part of the magic act where the magician lays the white cloth over the hat. Between the lines is the constant, aching enormity of loss and ruin: lost childhood, the dissolution of relationship, the ruins of love, the impossible search for belonging by a mind that is in the throes of transformation and dare I say larger and more intelligent than (but still vulnerable to) the brutal enigma of human love. This book is utterly electric in its connections, in its breadth and intimacy, gut-wrenching and full of secrets. It unfurls with a naturalist’s precision. It’s marvelous.

[Jonathan Belle · Rating 5 out of 5]

“How do you know what to keep?” So opens the first piece of Coleman Stevenson’s Light Sleeper. I love arduous little questions like this question, and found them sprinkled throughout Light Sleeper: “Out of what window do I want to see all mornings?”; “What is the color of mercy?”; “Should I be the black shadow over all the insects of the garden?”; etc. “Who Will Not Run?” is the title of one poem, a poem epigraph’d with a quote from Pliny the Younger, which jolts us back to ancient Pompeii and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius: “one moment reaching for a door—the next forever in that reach—”. Coleman presents to us those “who will not run / who want to see it coming for them”—the “it” being the “red-hot pumiced rain” and “absolute black.” These are the light sleepers among us, the ones awake with these questions, who will not run from these red-hot questions.

My favorite piece in Light Sleeper, “The Tilting Horizon Over the World Full of Holes,” which Coleman captions “after Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” wings us to another ancient subject: Icarus. This piece also opens with a question: “Is Pretending to Fly the Same as Flying?” In three sections, we fly from the myth of Icarus, who plummeted into the sea and was left there to drown by his (also-flying) father Daedulus, to the menacing, near-earth approach (on June 16th, 2015) of the asteroid 1566 Icarus, to an Aristotelian digression on the airless void, the vacuum—again, the “absolute black” from which some will not run.

The imagery in “The Tilting Horizon” ties so much together, or rather, ties and waxes so much together, about Light Sleeper: the sun melts away our supports, like the pyroclastic flow of Vesuvius, and centers our attention on the night of emptiness below and all around—the void (a void peeking through the book’s beautiful cover). Some will not sleep, cannot sleep, but must stare and hold vigil for a possible morning. The very last poem in Light Sleeper, “This Is What the Morning Is,” suggests there is such a morning: “I want to find out what kind of world lies under the sleeping city [...] There are some plants that will only flower there, lotuses of fire and air [...].”

[Michelle Keil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Coleman Stevenson's Light Sleeper describes a philosophy of noticing, playing with time, space, and scale. With the sensibility of a modern-day Emily Dickinson, Stevenson's language is creaturely, full of plant blood and planetary rotation, melancholy breakfasts, and garden dirt. There is a clockwork precision in the rhythm of these poems, from the shattering teacups in the included chapbook "Household Gods" to the momentous weighing of a bird's heart. Stevenson takes the world apart, extracting its essence, melting and recombining, turning the stones of her ideas over and over, refining the language of her experience. Light Sleeper lingered with me like a circle of longed-for solitude, reminding me of the alchemy of earthworms and the deep story in "the true face of the small, magnified and natural with appetite."

[Sarah Bartlett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Coleman Stevenson's poems capture all of a reader's senses and hold them captive. Her work is as sharp as it is tender in its examination of self, other, and the in-between spaces we inhabit. Both magical and grounded in the everyday, Stevenson brings us on a journey of transformation that itself transforms from poem to poem. "Sound enters the dream and becomes a body," she writes, bringing us along for the ride. It's no simple feat to create a collection of poems that manages to be private and inviting, dark as it is light, intimate and grand, but Stevenson deftly delivers an experience that leaves us hungry for more.