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The Sleepwalker at Sea is a wonderful collection of poems by Kelly Grovier. The poems meditate on aging, loss, love, and memory. These concepts spill into the dark passageways of childhood, the echoes from halls long empty. Not only does Grovier tie in a love for language and books, but his deft observations of nature position the poems as part of life.

It’s part of the human condition to experience loss. There are natural cycles involved with aging, forgetting, and dying, as well as in the movements of a “murmuration” as:

It rises in a bright shatter
of wings and lifts like a great
mind over the water’s still
uncreasing canvas,
each feathered filing an end

of thought, a pause –
each dip and wheel a mute
inflection in its organic
grammar: a poem of pure

punctuation, a ballet of full-
stops, lunulae and ellipses
flailing, falling, flicked

by a pointillist’s wrist
against the deep unweaving loom

of sea and sun and sun and sky.

Full of beauty and sadness, The Sleepwalker at Sea is a must read collection, which readers may find themselves returning to again and again.