Imagine your amazement at a monarch butterfly lighting on your shoulder in a subway station, the faint tune of your next favorite song playing in your head, and you’ll begin to feel what it’s like to read Michael O’Brien’s new book of poems. Spare and imagistic, vivid haiku-inspired poems such as “After Ôtaka Gengo Tadasuke” give way to short-lined lyrics such as “What She Does” that drip with the experience of the everyday as intensity and all-too-tragic beauty. The final lines of the latter poem are typical of his grasp of the living image in our natural environment:

“as the / willow takes the / wind, leaves flashing / silver as it turns” (40).

Time seems to stand still as the gentle pairing of soft w, l and s sounds blow together, forming the final, lasting image of a lover bearing the weight of her beloved upon her. The title poem, “Sleeping and Waking,” indeed, sets us adrift on the shores of the poet’s imagination, sifting through various states of alertness and lulled contemplation, even as O’Brien’s image of “wipers sifting the / day” evokes a repeated, rhythmic shift from clarity to opacity (44), as rain streams down the windshield and is wiped clear only to return yet again. By lending us the eyes and ears of one truly awake to the world around him, O’Brien’s poems remind us to attend to the beauty and aliveness of the world around us.