UNSLEEPING

While it may well be that the language of poetry and the imagery of dreams share a common origin in the human psyche, by now the notion is trite enough to make travel through the surreal dreamscapes of poetic imagination a tedious journey indeed. Most poetry about dreams remains merely dreamlike, too literal in concept and execution to get close to rendering the dreamer’s experience. In Burkard’s treatment, however, dreams are not abstractions, and “unsleeping” is not the same as “wakeful.” As in paintings by Magritte or de Chirico, poems come to life here in the details, in the everyday objects in odd juxtaposition. Images repeat with slight variations, one theme or idea morphing into the next. They become mesmerizing, like mantras, rituals, fetishistic dances, compulsions. While he is adept at capturing the feelings of creepiness, disorientation, and apprehension in dreams, some poems, such as “Kafka Tom,” remain inscrutable no matter how many times they are pulled apart and analyzed. At his worst, Burkard seems to be engaged in automatic writing, capable of concocting a line such as this: “Any sexual identity which shifted again when you knew the forest began but you could not get yourself to tell the snow or the thaw?” His better efforts, however, seem less like poems than dreams committed to paper, when “awakening from a night of ghosts . . . the brightness is . . . opaque.”

A collection of uneven quality, from the profound to the seemingly pointless, but a connection to Burkard’s work, once established, is worth the effort expended.