Washington Independent Review of Books
February 2018 Exemplars: Poetry Reviews by Grace Cavalieri

Sleigh reveals that “fact” and “ruin” are the same, as much as we’d like to believe our little mortality is a real commodity. He takes meaning to its extreme, pushing logic to become philosophy — taking the rough stuff of this earth, rolling it around in his hands and then letting us know just what it’s worth. The book has a great portion devoted to war (Libya, Baghdad) when he was witness to devastation, and writes of what he saw. But even more, he made a promise to young combatants to “tell their story.” Some of the poems are first sight, and others retelling. Because Sleigh was trained as an anthropologist he can realistically replicate cultural events. Although one doesn’t have to be an anthropologist to record the chilling horror of death, destruction and loss, the transcendent task is to never let it descend to reportage if poetry is the goal. Poetry is Sleigh’s task here and he’s one of a handful of writers today upholding the brightest part of our canon.

“Down from the Mount” is a four-page poem that’s heartbreaking, “all are dead ones like after-party/stragglers who//keep showing up in dreams, /saying, I want you/to keep this for me.” Later: “The dogs are terrorists to cats, the cats/terrorists to rats, the rats terrorists/to each other watching each other’s/terror. The rock band warming up to shut//inside its wall of noise…” Although there’s death at the ending, nobility in the writing overrides this. Sleigh, again and again, shows that poetry is a mechanism of service tapping into something more eternal than what we think is present and substantive. What is the substory of Sleigh’s poetry? He’s carrying on history — his own as well as others. The eight-part poem titled “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” presents windows into the treatment of POWs in perfect 14 line “sonnets.” (Talk about containing the tumult!) And with each narration is an actual interrogation technique combined with dreamlike surreality (poem 5): “We’d have three strobes/going at once, we’d lock this guy in a little box/and like me he’s afraid of insects and I’d have to turn into ants.”

The chaos and human defeats through the poems are dignified by a musicality and coherence. In the title poem “House of Fact, House of Ruin” — another long one — seven pages — listen to the glorious start of the fifth section titled “The Last To Be Excused”: “Remember the old aunts, sarcastic,/chain-smoking, gesturing with their canes,/scoring point after point with their widowed lungs?//How was I to eat with them as they pushed/ around their plates not peas and carrots/but distance and disdain for their silly nephew//still trying, at his age, to forget/how being old is as new to the old/as being just born is to the just born…”

Since Sleigh is known for his prose, it’s not surprising that several prose poems are in this book. My favorite is “Autobiography,” with an epigraph by mystery writer Raymond Chandler. (Ah, the romanticism.) A postmodern “intimations,” it’s a story of growing up, a permutation where Sleigh presents events, finally leaving “my promised land of Raymond Chandler”…“That was when I left the steppes forever, when/the tangled underlife entwined with voices that pricked/and burned, were now flattened to black squiggles on a page/where what comes from the tribe the tribe has lost…” He wisely notes at the end he knows he needs life insurance, plus, “I needed a vacation, /I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, /hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”

No matter how imagination becomes fantasy, there’s always a gravitational field in Sleigh’s work, so we don’t dare allow ourselves to be seduced. We know it’ll be fact to ruin, after all, although never said better; and when each piece is written it leaves, in spite of itself, a tough love that outlasts its life. Sleigh makes poetry go beyond itself. Like Wallace Stevens there’s an imperative beneath the line, words as a consequence of fine-grained thought. The complexities of experience can only be written with complexity, but the fundamental gift of craft makes poetry responsive to the world and allows the reader to respond in kind. He couldn’t do this without clarity and irony, making the consequential burdens of life beautiful things.

The Fox

Marine helicopters on maneuver kept dipping

toward swells at Black’s Beach, my board’s poise

giving way to freefall of my wave tubing

over me, nubs of wax under my feet as I crouched

under the lip, sped across the face and kicked out —

all over Southern Cal a haze settled: as if light breathed

that technicolor smog at sunset over

San Diego Harbor where battleships at anchor,

just back from patrolling the South China Sea, were

having rust scraped off and painted gray.

This was my inheritance that lay stretched before me:

which is when I felt the underbrush give way

and the fox that thrives in my brain,

not looking sly but just at home in his pelt

and subtle paws, broke from cover and ran

across the yard into the future to sniff my gravestone,

piss, and move on. And so I was reborn into

my long nose and ears, my coat’s red, white, and brown

giving off my fox smell lying heavy on the winds

in the years when I’d outsmart guns, poison,

dogs and wire, when the rooster and his hens

clucked and ran, crazy with terror

at how everything goes still in that way a fox adores,

gliding through slow-motion drifts of feathers.