Army Cats: POEMS

“In the title poem of this latest from Kingsley Tufts Award winner Sleigh (Space Walk), readers experience ‘Cat invasion of the mind. Cat tribes/ running wild.’ These aren’t cute kitties, though, but ‘great six-toed brutes’ cavorting in the shadow of army tanks. Tanks, snipers, bombings, bloodshed, ‘mankilling time’—they all feature prominently in Part 1 of this collection, carefully detailed in blunt-spoken and sometimes even prosy fashion, with no lyric overload. It’s as if Sleigh were acting as a reporter, describing violence in Iraq and Beirut and Cana, where Jesus once turned water to wine; one poem is even titled ‘Reporter.’ In Part 2, death gets broader and deeper—there it is, in a sweaty nightclub-like setting, ‘leaning over/ secretly spitting in everybody’s drink’—and the writing gets more acrid, too. Part 3 ratchets up the energy, giving a feeling of life run riot, ‘our bodies/ longing to be held and fucked into oblivion.’ What better way to drown out our bitter end?
VERDICT As he moves with masterly control from section to section, style to style, yet pulling along a constant narrative thread, Sleigh shows just how accomplished he is. Most devotees of contemporary poetry should try.

—Barbara Hoffert

https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/army-cats

“First things, first. Full disclosure: Tom Sleigh was my teacher and thesis advisor at Hunter College. Fuller disclosure: my admiration for Tom’s poetry outweighs any personal loyalty to Tom (though I have that too).

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Tom Sleigh’s method is art, but his end is anthropological. His vision is fully humane, an attempt to catalogue people, events, and his own place among them. Because of this, one might be surprised that this collection begins with a three part series of poems that picture a lively army scene populated by anthropomorphized cats. In this opening poem, readers find the sheer pleasure of reading Sleigh’s poetry. His idiom is musical, yet speechly:

Over by the cemetery next to the CP
you could see them in wild catmint going crazy:
I watched them roll and wriggle, paw it, lick it,
chew it, leap about, pink tongues stuck out, drooling.

Cats in the tanks’ squat shadows lounging
Or sleeping curled up under gun turrets.
Hundreds of them sniffing or licking
long hind legs stuck in the air…

The sounds ring back and forth along these lines, resonating with one another in a way that feels formal yet unrestricted…”

-Micah Towery

 “In Army Cats, American poet Tom Sleigh takes on the topic of the 2007 Lebanese Civil War not as an excuse for wanton journalistic rubbernecking, but as a catalyst for a series of troubled meditations on the nature of “force” within contemporary culture…”

“Sleigh has been publishing formidable poetry for almost thirty years, and among American poets of his generation there is no one better. He has arrived at this status in no small measure because few of his generational peers have been as willing to so successfully address large and abiding subjects as well as intensely personal ones. And that he accomplishes all this with a seething clarity of vision that never lapses into grandiosity makes his accomplishment all the more noteworthy.”

-David Wojahn