The map I’m after is scarred – creased
where half the land’s been folded back,
forgotten, and half has wiped the palms,

the frozen eyes of Napoleon or Petraeus.
Why, you ask, do I seek such a thing –
elbow-deep in the neighbour’s rubbish?
Why else: we’re lost, of course.


from 'Map'

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’.

Cover painting Jindřich Ulrich, The Sleepwalker, 2010. Oil on wood. Private collection. © Jindřich Ulrich, reproduced by kind permission of the artist. Cover painting:

Contents


The Guest
Hobbies
Watermarks
Feet
The Other City
Mississippi
To Carry the One
The Thread
Map
Second-Hand
The Book of Clues
Adding Up
Almonds
The Frame
Schoolteacher
Face Blindness
Wan Hu’s Flying Chair
‘It’s turtles all the way down’
Exact Change
At Spring
Hummingbird
Inventions
Common Ground
Malá Strana
Wren
A Butterfly in the British Museum
Icon
Fra Angelico
The Vanishing Hand
Permanent Collection
Bird in the Air Pump
Giacometti’s Walking Man
The Ruined Statue of a Saint
The Ratio
Buried Candles
The Microscope
Drift
Tom Paine’s Bones
A Tortoise in the Chelsea Physic Garden
The Meadow
Old-Fashioned Things
Trakl
The Lost Room
The Glass Armonica
The Carnival Tent
Carrick-a-Rede
Kingfisher
Lips
Rilke
Fergus
The Sleepwalker at Sea
Murmuration
A Little Night Music
Recent Acquisitions
Pancho Villa
Reading in Bed