Poetry Book Society

Sleeping It Off in Rapid City presents, for the first time, an opportunity to cast an eye over the full oeuvre of Kleinzahler's poetry. Four decades are distilled into a volume of urban sketches, character studies and hard won "fevers and dreams"; the collated wanderings of a mind caught in the hinterland of belonging. Nothing here can be taken for granted. The poems fizz with an unpredictable energy as we are whisked from the polluted waysides of America to late night booze ups, "drinking in the dawn" with famous types, name-dropped like olives into martinis.

The poems have a casual beauty about them, made to be read aloud perhaps, but there's nothing pretty about the grey tones and rough, colloquial ("C'mon, luv, let's give the punters a show") seams that run through them. They have a jazz-noise about them, finely hewn yet experimental. The world is laid bare before us, its sweethearts departed, pulsating with free-fall rhythms of possibility, and 'to hell with the risks'. It's a retrospective aching with wanderlust and homesickness, buoyed by a delicacy of observation almost photographic in nature: "On wet streets / The melting greens and reds of traffic lights".

Kleinzahler is at home, too, in the sound of things, "The crow's raw hectoring cry / scoops clean an oval divot / of sky", and is transfixed by jets screaming through the air ("where can they all be going"). Music and travel permeate the poems, as does as a duality between Nature and the true nature of the world as he sees it. In a manifesto of sorts towards the end, part V consisting of new poems, he states "A moon is never so pretty as in a poisoned sky". Indeed, much of the volume's imagery hinges on this relationship between the natural world, dulling to his creative zeal in itself, "A birch among a sea of birches does not enchant", and his own world, "the chemical ghost of old factories, / the rotted piers and warehouses". This conflict breaths life into his poetry. "Red pear leaves take the light at four... the two reds embering" becomes "The power plant on Point Street... glowing orange now in sodium light... red lights blinking". Nature becomes a catalyst for reverie and reminiscence, setting loose a whirling, transcendent memory. Sadness at seeing his mother in hospital, surrounded by "ashed old ladies / lost to TV" is articulated by the sight of a dogwood tree casting off the last of its blossoms into a "bleak perfume of benzene and exhaust".

Aside from the anecdotes and the character studies, (dying poet, acid head, lonely man in a chinese takeaway), there's a heavy dose of nostalgia shot through the poems. The landscapes he encounters evoke a yearning for his New Jersey homeland, "Warm grass and dragonflies- / O my heart", yet he's tied to the city, most significantly San Francisco. These studies in tone and place are ultimately about placelessness, about wandering, about finding meaning in a life that's wrapped up in a great movement towards expiration: "The world has been coming to an end / for 5,000 years".

In an after-death encounter with God at the volume's own end, the poet is shown a film of his life. Faced with such "catalogs of failure, self-deception", torn from the landscapes that inspire him, there is nothing left save humour and a sad refusal to search out the sense of it all; the whole is reduced to a can of coke. Ultimately, the book is full of "clarity / jeopardy / change", riven with melancholy and surreal insight: a welcome paean to a modern American master.


Jack Davies is a freelance writer and photographer specialising in travel and the arts. His website is www.jackdaviesimages.com