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Close Reading: 6:30AM by Andrew McMillan

This poem is short enough to quote in full (assuming the editors don’t mind).

sleep had been singular
so long
that   on waking next to him
I felt like the submariner resurfacing
amazed to find the world survived
with so much air
such tundra of sky

With its spareness, the absence of punctuation and that little gap in the third line, this poem is strongly reminiscent of the work of British poets Lee Harwood and Tom Raworth, and by extension, connects McMillan with that branch of Transatlantic twentieth century innovative poetry which favours lightness of touch and a casual, conversational tone. With Frank O’Hara as its grand master.

Whilst on the surface, this fragment of text might appear so simple as to be simplistic (and any mention of sleep, sky and ‘the world’ is enough to get me really worried!), I actually found this a very subtle and affecting poem. For a start, the repeated S sounds (sleep/singular/so long/submariner/resurfacing/survived/so much/such/sky) create a kind of dreamlike logic through which we are gently pulled. And then there’s the intriguing way the poem grapples with time and space. How can sleep be both ‘singular’ and ‘so long’? How can waking ‘next to’ (horizontal) someone also be ‘resurfacing’ (vertical)?

Deftly moving from the personal to the universal (even ecological), the poem finally opens  into a ‘tundra of sky’ – an image that for me calls up the people-less worlds of environmental catastrophe films such as The Day After Tomorrow.

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Every day for as long as I can muster, I will flick through The Salt Book of Younger Poets (ed. Lumsden & Stonborough, 2011) and randomly select one poem to investigate using my immense critical faculties. This is mainly an excuse for not reviewing the book properly.

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