Interview with a Ghost

In Interview with a Ghost, celebrated poet Tom Sleigh investigates poetry from his conviction that “while art and life are separable, they aren’t separate.” With passion and erudition, these essays explore issues of selfhood that are often assumed but not adequately confronted by contemporary poetry—namely, subjectivity and its limits, what it means to employ the first person in a poem, the elusive “I” with all of its freighted aesthetic and psychological implications. The works of poets such as Anne Bradstreet, Sir Walter Raleigh, Robert Lowell, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, and Frank Bidart are examined, as are Sleigh’s own poems and translations in the contexts of history and private life, disease and health, the realm of the spirit and the realm of the day to day.

Sleigh has constructed a book textured by an intriguing array of multiple forms. One essay imagines the poet preparing and delivering a lecture on his life and art, followed by an imagined reception full of jokes and asides; another essay veers into a contemporary myth involving Odysseus’s son, Telemachus; another becomes a wild extended parable about the avant-garde; the title piece, in the form of an interview, interrogates the poetic soul after the body has passed on. In a style that suits the subject of the multiplicity of the self, Interview with a Ghost defines a new paradigm for thinking and writing about poetry.