Wide slumber for lepidopterists reviewed by UK's Stride Magazine
Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists is a gorgeous poetic conceit. It's beautifully produced, a kind of pocket-sized textual flicker book, with some lovely illustrations too. Its subject is sleep, its different stages and parasomnias, viscerally evoked using the language of lepidoptery in quite astonishing experimental configurations. It is textbook of 'Sleepidoptera', as Rawlings coins. The process of sleep starts with a hypnotic hush: 'a hoosh a ha / a hoosh a ha...'; then we're swept into a glistening, semi-submerged awareness of self and body. Desires, disorders, the deep soundings of the unconscious all woven into a 'hyperlove sleepspell'; crazily, elegantly traced onto the page. Thorax/cervix; Uvula /vulva. There are many metamorphoses in this literary cocoon where words and body soften and fold onto each other.
It's difficult, as with Walsh's volume, to give a sense of Rawlings' use of layout, very varied as it is in 'Wide Slumber'. Some sections are lineated, some solid squares of text, stubs of refrain linked by zzz's of snoring. 'Bruxism' (teeth grinding) generates a series of concrete poems; blocks of clamped-down language, fizzing bubbles of lettering rising from them as the reader looks down. 'Sleep spindles' are more delicate: 'habit of holding/ shoulder blades / as wings / when at rest'; 'Somnambulism' has lines of poetry walking across the page: 'feel a fraction of fracture through floor beat wing pulse porous flake frail common footman'. Talk in your sleep? Try a (Joycean) somniloquy: 'or a norming butterpillar in th ravening nd when we grow tired we miss our lungs nd sonic gossamer: afling aflong.' I rather loved the glossary at the end of the book too, mingling, as does the text, its specialist lexicons.
'Let the body do as the body does,' a concluding phrase suggests: Wide Slumber has an imaginative balance between verbal crafting and linguistic freedom in its observation of our dreaming, our biologies, our brief, iridescent life spans.
