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Synopsis
Sleeping and Waking moves between states of consciousness and the phenomenal world, finding reciprocities among sleep, dreams, weather, and urban signs. O Brien s curiosity gets drawn to the edges of everyday life, rendering each local event with concision and exactitude. His poems offer what Ezra Pound calls "luminous details" in glimpsed gestures or overheard vernacular, full of the flaneur s alert attention.
"Over the years O Brien has pared his poetry to essentials. He shapes this matter in many forms, and the resulting music is declarative, terse, and elegant. No ornament blurs the reader s intense pleasure." William Corbett
"No other poet now writing is more alert from word to word or registers the world with Michael O Brien s oblique precision." August Kleinzahler
The New York Times - David Orr
Sleeping and Waking is a quietly startling collection that ought to earn O'Brien not only poetry-world attention, but actual readers. They'll need to be attentive, though. O'Brien is primarily an observer rather than a debater, and the poems here are heavy on isolated images, dream logic, bits of overheard conversation (typically urban conversation) and memories, with larger themes emerging through juxtapositions and repetitions…While O'Brien's technical skills should be crisp enough to please the iciest avant-gardist, he has one virtue more cerebral poets often lack: he isn't afraid to make a plain statement. In other hands, that virtue can become a self-satisfied vice, but here it lends a necessary sharpness to an otherwise fluid and dreamlike collection.