Art and Poetry
Sleeping in the Same World
Sleeping in the Same World is a prolonged interior monologue not bound by punctuation or limited to any specific place or moment, but hovering in a continuous present. It is the voice of a mind urgently articulating questions of the self, the soul, religious doubt and hope, and the possibility of true relation. The accompanying selection, Journeys, ponders over home and homeland, exile and return. Throughout the book Lloyd’s lyrical phrasing, shaped by her Welsh background, gives the lines a particular timbre or grain as timeless as it is contemporary.
— Henry Lyman, author of The Land Has Its Say
With fierce delicacy, Lloyd offers her meditation on an “infinite private world.” Invited, you join an intricate slow dance of exploration, its pivots and queries. Plucking
jtruth like a berry, or a piece of sea glass, she insists “myths long for us to live them again” and touches on the many variations of returning home. To love, to turn and keep loving with all one’s “scars and faults” fills this radiant book, its hope and solace.
— Jody (Pamela) Stewart, author of This Momentary World: Selected Poems
In this exquisite new book, Margaret Lloyd explores her beginnings in Liverpool and Wales and later life in New England. A world of lost loved ones coexists in the present. The book starts with a series of spare, intensely intimate poems charged with love, natural beauty, and heart truths. A sequence of journeys follows, quests for existential peace between two worlds.
— Jeffrey Greene, winner of the Samuel French Morse Prize
These poems are above all a bridge: between countries, between people, between the poet’s self in different moments of time, between the world of the living and that of the dead. Sleeping in the Same World invites us all to listen to poems that become, in the end, a prayer.
— Emilia Ivancu, Romanian poet and translator
The matter of Margaret Lloyd’s poems is always substantial, and always accompanied by her excellent craft. The poems are nuanced beyond themselves. They create a lasting resonance. They produce an oddness that works as a shadow and multiplier of something elusive and foreign under the decorum.
— Jack Gilbert, finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize
How to purchase:
FROM THE POET:
Please make write a check payable to “Margaret Lloyd” ($23)
and mail to the address below with your contact information.
Margaret Lloyd
17 Lilly Street
Florence, MA 01062
Or email me at mglynnelloyd@gmail.com
Let us speak of your wound
I ask you not to turn away
but to examine it closely
In its natural unnatural
and very particular state
Will you receive me
give me permission to enter
We gaze until my eyes
or your eyes falter and fall
to look perhaps at the table
or at our hands
I change the subject so you
won’t go away but then
Where are we as we walk
from the wound which has now
strangely become my wound
For which I have no words
Under a Sky
My first sky was in Liverpool after the war
while there were still rations and a quiet
because no bombs were falling.
That kind of quiet. I was just born.
Stay with me. I am groping for something.
It is time to leave the tall grasses and buttercups,
wind roving the surface of the water.
It is time to go inside myself, and when I close my eyes
I see a yellow sky. But when I open them
I look at the blue above me.
This is the sky over the mothers and fathers
whose children were killed in school.
And this is the sky under which people
carry the old on their backs hoping
to bring them to safety. This is the sky
under which the children played in a square
now in rubble with small bodies underneath.
Summer is close. I live a bountiful life.
Under what regard am I? Under what regard
is anyone? I have disturbed the merganser
with her babies in the pond, and they have retreated
to the far end, hiding. I sit further away,
and they appear. Shall I disturb them again
as though I am some willful god? I move, they move.
Someone in this country or across the world
is looking at a last sky. And it is not quiet.
Measurements
If you were the chief poet in Wales,
you were given a harp by the king
and a gold ring by the queen.
If you insulted a poet
you would be levied six cattle
and one hundred and twenty pence.
If you killed a poet, you’d be out
one hundred and twenty six cattle
and one hundred and twenty pence.
My father, mother, Gareth, and I took a train
from Liverpool to Southampton docks and boarded
the Britannic, tourist class, nine days later
arriving in the Port of New York
with three trunks, one basket, one tin trunk,
six suitcases and one hat box.
Now I look out of the frame of my hair
into the frame of the window
which divides the blue sky further
into pieces that change with the wind.
I am a part of all this.
A broken bottle by the edge of the path.
A leaf skittering over the frozen snow.
One sparkle on the river flowing north.
To schedule a poetry reading or with questions please contact me: