Sleep on Needles by Richard Lyons

To read a Richard Lyons poem is to be ushered into a dreamscape by a skilled and trustworthy guide. In this arresting book, a nautilus hums, a man paints with the oil from an oil spill. Worlds and lifetimes ripple through these spare, muscular poems, and even the most clear-eyed view of suffering is accompanied by some element of comfort. “There’s no time left,” writes Lyons, just before offering a glimmer of hope for something still to come: “I am waiting.” These are urgent and utterly moving poems.

–Catherine Pierce

Sleep on Needles, Richard Lyons’s sixth poetry collection, is testament to a poet of keen observation whose language provides a context for poignant perceptions that needle one’s psyche with hauntings of lost loved ones, aging, and the passage of time.  His reveries provide a nexus for self-awareness within a world of persistent complexity and inevitable change.  Lyons states, “Reverie insists on its own / concept of time taking me out to its edges, / sun and water in short supply.”  But his poems are not of the dream world, per se.  Instead, they eloquently explore transient realities that together remind us of our inextricable connections to nature, to experience, and to one another.  These poems are generous in what they offer and inclusive in what they provide.  Lyons’s gift of embracing existence within language makes it possible for us to share in his hope that “… language will lift the shadows / as easy as cedar waxwings relay a berry / down a line of birds….”

–Gary Myers, author of Planet Auschwitz