Starting from Sleep
New and Selected Poems
by Charles Martin

A poet of formal brilliance and a darkly comic sensibility, two-time Pulitzer Prize-nominee Charles Martin has, over three decades of creativity, produced a most unusual collection of poems; the forms are traditional but the concerns are as contemporary as TV's Jeopardy, lingerie from Victoria's Secret, or leftover ICBMs.

"Deft, witty, intelligent and richly colloquial, this is poetry of technical mastery and an easy freedom based on well-earned assurance."
— Anthony Hecht

"Charles Martin writes with a refreshing boldness and subtlety."
— Paul Lake, The Threepenny Review

"A poet of masterly command, Charles Martin can think fiercely and feel intensely. He can captivate us with a sustained narrative, or dazzle us with a wicked epigram. For a long time, we've needed a generous array of his work; Starting from Sleep provides not only this, but much that is new and exciting. In Martin's poems, the classical tradition is alive, and conquers fresh territory."
— X.J. Kennedy

"It was with that wonderful poem "Passages from Friday" that I got to know Charles Martin's poetry well, and my admiration for their tough-minded moral substance has continued to grow. The new poems in this volume have a new sort of power. It is not only that Martin's wit, his exquisite and original modulation of formal cadences and his classical learning make his epigrams the finest of those by a living writer, but that in his larger concerns for the particulars of representation and reality he remains sage and serious whether being pointed or meditative. This is a strong and lovely book."
— John Hollander