ISBN: 0819511404 9780819511409

Category: Poetry / General

Page count: 49

The domestic facts of life are fashioned into searching meditations by Rachel Hadas in A Son From Sleep, a book about wakings. The poet is admonished by her dreams and summoned from her slumbers. Hadas's acute observation of ordinary things illuminates and expands them. She listens while a child "plaits her fledgling macrame / of consonants and vowels." She learns "several kinds of silence." She resolves to "uncover language / as medium of nothing except mysteries," and for Hadas, mysteries take root in tangible things--in cats, blankets, subways, her husband, and especially, in motherhood.