Throughout his collection Martin's mind works over a variety of concerns, including the game show Jeopardy!, Victoria's Secret lingerie, John Coltrane and Petronius, the "disappeared" in Guatemala, and an artists' colony in California. One is struck by the fecundity of his imagination, his ability to clothe ideas in an array of shapes and textures. In "Victoria's Secret," he meditates on the supposedly repressed sex life of the Victorians:

Victorian mothers instructed their daughters, ahem,
That whenever their husbands were getting it off on them,
The only thing for it was just to lie perfectly flat
And try to imagine themselves out buying a new hat. . . .

But in that commentary are further complications regarding the contemporary merchandising of sex, as well as the idea that times, if they've changed at all, haven't changed much, and if we think ourselves more enlightened than our ancestors, we should think again. By looking at a Victoria's Secret catalog, Martin writes, " . . .we're intended to feel

That this isn't simply a matter of sheer lingerie,
But rather the baring of something long hidden away
Behind an outmoded conception of rectitude:
Liberation appears to us, not entirely nude,
In the form of a fullbreasted nymph, implausibly slim,
Airbrushed at each conjunction of torso and limb,
Who looks up from the page with large and curious eyes
That never close: and in their depths lie frozen
The wordless dreams shared by all merchandise,
Even the hats that wait in the dark to be chosen.

In great part, Martin is interested in time, history, and how the present and past speak to one another, or, in certain cases, refuse to speak. In an America that sometimes balks at looking to its past, Martin defines American poetry by the way poets examine history. "There may be only two kinds of American poets," he writes,

distinguishable from one another by their contrasting attitudes toward history: One kind of American poet accepts its weight, the other writes to annul it. The tradition of American poetry consists of the need to find oneself on one side or other of the divide. The choice (if it really is a choice) between an awareness of history and the desire to repeal it and begin over again determines in part the themes of American poets and the ways in which they write about them. That choice also affects a poet's relationship with the audience for American poetry, an audience most often characterized, these days, by its problematic nature; either it is absent (having chosen to go to the shopping mall) or present (in the classroom) under duress, but for credit.

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Richly inventive new poems accompany a generous selection from Charles Martin's three previous collections in Starting from Sleep.

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. "Deft, witty, intelligent and richly colloquial, this is poetry of technical mastery and an easy freedom based on well-earned assurance," said the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Anthony Hecht.

Renowned for his translations of Catullus and Ovid, Charles Martin writes poems whose subjects are delightfully unpredictable. From New York's Bowery, to an artist's colony in California, to the landscape of Vermont, Martin find "the legends of the heart's lust for joy and violence."