SLEEPING WITH YOU AND OTHER NIGHT-TIME ADVENTURES by GEOFF STEVENS

NEIL LEADBEATER Reviews

Sleeping With You and Other Night-time Adventures by Geoff Stevens

(Indigo Dreams Publishing, Stoney Stanton, Leicestershire, UK, 2011)

Geoff Stevens, who died earlier this year, was editor of Purple Patch and had work published in over 700 magazines worldwide. An author of six collections of poetry, he was an acclaimed reader of his own work and appeared before audiences in many venues throughout the UK including, most recently, the Swansea International Poetry Festival.  He was a champion of the small press publishing scene and a recipient of the Hastings Poetry Prize and the Ted Slade Award for Services to Poetry.

The full title of this final volume is Sleeping With You and Other Night-time Adventures. The poems cover a wide range of emotions. Many of them have a surrealistic quality about them as if they were written on the borderline of sleep.

Various definitions of night emerge as one progresses through the book. Night is “a bleating within sleep’s dreams / a grey disembowelment / silent and scabied”, it “blinks between legend and reality”, it is “dazed with concussion’s stars”, it “shares its time with things that rustle in the undergrowth” and it is “a place where you shrink-wrap your fear in a nylon quilt of self-preservation”.

That fear makes itself very plain in one of the opening poems—a childhood recollection of being close to death:

Pneumonia, the doctor said,

double pneumonia

the boy should be dead.

Dreams and nightmares inhabit sleep in poems such as “First Steps”, “The Left Hand of Darkness” and “Bad Nights in Bedlam” This is a realm which you eventually wake from

within a blizzard of twisted sheets.

There is also an air of menace abroad in “Night Service” where violence is never far from the surface:

On the late bus

the atmosphere breathes from the stomach

ingested beer and curry

and you sit in the leering zone

showing too much leg in your short skirt

while the lager-louts

utter their desires…

The equally menacing “Owl”—which, when you read the first line, is actually another take on Ginsberg’s celebratory poem “Howl”—also makes its point quite succinctly beginning with the words

I saw the best predators of my generation destroyed by pesticides,

naked hysterical poison

and then, at the end, it makes its kill

in the dream light of swooping oblivion.

The industrial landscape of the West Midlands is never far away. There are hints of the night shift, of piece work and of the noise of machinery on the lit factory floor. Night, we are told,  “is not a solid sleeper”—it “works in the dark”.

Clever wordplay—always a strongpoint with this poet, is exhibited in the poem “Black Box” where “the autopilot flies us through our sleep”—with the poet grateful that he has made a safe landing into the next day:

…despite the fact that flights of fancy

have no parachutes and there is a real danger

of crashing out of this world

into the next

every morning so far

I have awoken to count myself amongst

the survivors.

Other poems are lighter in tone and subject-matter. “Night Window” is an exquisite poem about shyness while “Passing the Night” gives a poetic perspective on the well-worn phrase about “going to see a man about a dog”:

an imaginary man

with his dog

down by the foggy river

unclear where exactly

……

I go to the bathroom

pull the chain silently.

In “Because the Night is Made for Lovers” wit is self-evident in the first six lines:

Because the night is made for lovers

I meet the others

in the afternoons

when the moon’s influence has waned

and lust alone reigns

behind the drawn curtains of suburban rooms…

In among all these pages there are some beautifully-crafted love poems. Some of these read like shy statements while others are erotic, forthright and bold. There is a tenderness here that is both attractive and heart-warming. “Erogenous” is a skilful blend of drama and coyness, boldness and humour. For me, it is one of the most startling poems in the book because it works on so many different levels and is well-contained in its presentation. Having been through the ordeal of a bomb-alert on the London Underground:

you lay in state

on the hotel bed

------

I still have my day ticket

ALL ZONES AVAILABLE  it says…

a memento of the day

I first saw you naked and afraid.

In time, that nakedness becomes a beauty to behold with each morning light:

Naked you are as complex as calculus

and yet so easily differentiated

because it is a nakedness

that I have come to know

so that my mind calculates the area beneath the curve

without but a thought

and tells me in the darkness

that it is you.

The short poem, “Stay With Me Till Morning” seems like a fitting way in which to conclude this review. It blurs the line between the lover and the loved so that the two become indistinguishable and sums up what this collection is really all about.

Now that I’ve found you

the ideal word

the perfect line

do not disappear in my dreams

before I write you down

but stay with me

stay with me till morning.

*****

Neil Leadbeater is an editor, author and poet living in Edinburgh, Scotland. His poems and short stories have been published widely in anthologies and small press magazines and journals both at home and abroad. His first full-length collection of poems, Hoarding Conkers at Hailes Abbey was published by Littoral Press in 2010 and a selection of his Latin American poems, Librettos for the Black Madonna, was published by White Adder Press in 2011.