A Son from Sleep

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.