| The Cow Jumped Over the Moon: Night Poetry
Cow'sleap--A Nightbook is a collection of challenging, demanding, and rewarding poems that focus on the brain's activity at night, while the body is asleep. These are not poems to make us feel good. "Reader," the poet says, "let me get my clause in you." And the reader is glad to oblige, because the poems pay and repay.
The poems in Cow'sleap are full of style. There are some formal poems here, villanelles and sonnets and rhyming epigrams. And there are invented forms, as well as departures from form. There is wordplay galore, and typographic tricks in spades, with O's jumping in and out of upper case. The poet loves the sound of words, repeating them and reusing them economically to get the most out of each. The poems have a lot of fun finding new meanings in old themes, from fairytales to Shakespeare. The images are arresting and always surprising.
But the poems here are about more than style. The slippery, self-invented logic of the work is informed by the subject matter of the book: what happens to the brain at night, in sleep, while the cow jumps over the moon. The mind goes wild. Old images recur. Sex pops up repeatedly. Words bring on more words, images free-associate to other images, and a mood of tension builds. The first part of the book gets us deeper and deeper into the dark labyrinth of sleep. The second part is a series of increasingly wild dreamscapes. And the third section sorts things out a bit, becoming more accessible to reason, and yet is no less thought-provoking.
It's remarkable that Cow'sleap is the product of nearly forty years of writing. For all its variety, this collection of poems is a unified body of work, with a unified style and theme, and a logical progression.
About the author
Tom Smith is a professor emeritus at Castleton State College where he taught such classes as children's literature, lyric poetry, and creative writing. This is his sixth book, and he has been published in numerous publications including The Beloit Poetry Journal, The G.W. Review, The Iowa Review, The Virginia Quarterly, Beyond Baroque, The Carolina Quarterly, Epoch, and the Chicago Review. Tom Smith lives and writes in Castleton, Vermont. |
