If I Could Sleep Deeply Enough
is the author's fifth book of poetry, a previous volume having been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. There are four parts, the first being a kind of sequence or series of meditations on the experience and symbolism of sleep as a kind of death which gives meaning to our waking life. These highly personal poems are followed by a section containing a number of very strong poems on the seasons, other lives, and public events. The varied work in the last two sections can also be described as meditative, questioning, and religious in the most basic and universal sense. As the reader takes up this book and goes through it attentively, he or she will experience a deepening of poetic feeling which results in a kind of revelation.