„Our country´s dead/ melt into the earth“

The New Yorker vom 28.4.03 gibt im Netz vier Kurzkritiken zu neuen Lyrikbänden, darunter von Les Murray und Tom Sleigh:

Far Side of the Earth, by Tom Sleigh (Houghton Mifflin; $22).

Always learned and formally adept, Sleigh, in his fifth collection, revs both diction and syntax to produce his best work yet. Despite the linguistic extravagance, the results are pleasingly transparent, and what might have remained merely virtuosic here attains real depth. A sequence of poems about September 11th asserts the importance of poetry itself, by translating a four-thousand-year-old Sumerian lamentation on Ur (“Our country’s dead / melt into the earth”) and a spell from Greek magical papyri, which announces, “This is the charm that will protect you.”

Sleigh und andere (darunter Martin Espada und Frieda Hughes) werden auch in der NYT vom 20.4.03 besprochen.