Book description
The poems in The Sleepwalker at Sea tread a fluid line between
dream and wakefulness, memory and loss, presence and longing. Leave a
house and it suddenly fills with 'the unseen'; consult 'The Book of
Clues' and discover only 'ghostly hints' of a self you've left behind.
Linked by their restless displacement, pacing haunted spaces, these
are poems that question what it means to be in the world and seek
answers in lost rooms, missing sketches, disappearing fragments. By
turns meditative and playful, romantic and philosophical, The
Sleepwalker at Sea strides an invisible path through streets of
strangers, in search of ruined altars, buried candles, and 'the
whispering galleries of the dead'. Here, deer 'dissolve / into a
tapestry of mist', a butterfly 'measures / the universe's weight', and
the soul 'sculpts itself in frostlit air'.
Kelly Grovier was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and educated at the
University of California, Los Angeles. He received his doctorate from
Oxford University in 2005 after being awarded a British Marshall
Scholarship. Co-founder of the scholarly journal European Romantic
Review, he is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and
the Observer. He has written widely on the Romantic poets, especially
Wordsworth and Keats, and his biography of London's notorious Newgate
prison will be published by John Murray (Hodder) in 2008. In 2004 he was
appointed Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of
Wales, Aberystwyth. His first Carcanet/ OxfordPoets collection A Lens in
the Palm was published in 2008.
