And now the alphabet yields a shining whale! Carson has won a formidable array of prizes and is a MacArthur Fellow, but I still remember my first encounter with what I could then only define as the utter strangeness of her sensibility. Not the least of the pleasures in her latest multidisciplinary offering is "Every Exit Is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)," an essay that illuminates the mystery informing her strongest writings. Recounting a dream that she had as a young child, Carson describes a vision of her family's living room that seems to be as much a product of the visionary imagination as of REM sleep:

The usual dark green sofa and chairs stood along the usual pale green walls...nothing was out of place. And yet it was utterly, certainly, different...as changed as if it had gone mad....[but] I explained the dream to myself by saying that I had caught the living room sleeping. I had entered it from the sleep side. And it took me years to recognize...why I found this entrance into strangeness so supremely consoling. For despite the spookiness, inexplicability and later tragic reference of the green living room, it was and remains for me a consolation to think of it lying there, sunk in its greenness, breathing its own order...something incognito at the heart of our sleeping house.

Carson uses this dream as an entry into an analysis of Elizabeth Bishop's "The Man-Moth," a poem itself based on a sleeper's misreading of the word "mammoth," along with discussions of further sleep-drenched works. But what I find most resonant are the entranced defamiliarizations that illuminate the dream-work out of which Carson's own art often arises.

Like most of Carson's books, Decreation includes some fine examples of such art, including the comically ecstatic "Ode to Sleep," into which "Every Exit Is an Entrance" cleverly segues:

                                    Think of your life without it.
Without that slab of outlaw time punctuating every
       pillow—without pillows.
Without the big black kitchen and the boiling stove where
       you
                                              snatch morsels
                           of your own father's legs and arms
                        only to see them form into a sentence
                which—you weep with sudden joy—will save
                           you
                                             if you can remember it
                                                      later!

At its best, the verse here shares with the prose Carson's gift for telling what Dickinson called the "truth," but telling it "slant." Especially moving are the elegiac lyrics in memory of her mother with which she opens the volume. "Sleepchains" is heartfelt in the angular grief with which it shapes the cauchemar of lamentation:

                         Who can sleep when she—
         hundreds of miles away I feel that vast breath
                                  fan her restless decks.
                                  ..........................
                Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.
                           Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

But the work of Decreation weakens when the decreation of the daytime world doesn't issue in a recreation of dreamlike vistas: exits don't turn into entrances. I've never been fond of Carson's generic experiments—the "shooting scripts," etc.—so I find "Lots of Guns: An Oratorio for Five Voices," with its Steinian riff on "tender guns" (v. Tender Buttons), somewhat silly, in particular because it addresses serious political issues. And ditto the "H & A Screenplay," where Heloise and Abelard sit at an absurdist kitchen table uttering a pointless series of Beckett knockoffs: "Hot day./.../You know I wonder about those leftovers./What about them./Will they last." This stuff makes me wonder about "those leftovers" too: Carson should consign them to the disposal. Even the shiniest whale, alas, can get too blubbery. This brilliant poet should remember the livingness of her dream's green living room.

— Sandra M. Gilbert