The King's Touch: Poems

By Tom Sleigh

A profound encounter with the hyperreality of our time of global upheaval, violence, and pandemic.

Tom Sleigh’s poems are skeptical of the inevitability of our fate, but in this brilliant new collection, they are charged with a powerful sense of premonition, as if the future is unfolding before us, demanding something greater than the self. Justice is a prevailing force, even while the poems are fully cognizant of the refugee crisis, war, famine, and the brutal reality of a crowded hospital morgue.

The King’s Touch collides the world of fact and the world of mystery with a resolutely secular register. The title poem refers to the once-held belief that the king, as a divine representative, is imbued with the power of healing touch. Sleigh turns this encounter between illness and human contact toward his own chronic blood disease and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its mounting death tolls. One poem asks, “isn’t it true that no matter how long you / wear them, masks don’t grieve, only faces do?”

In this essential new work, Sleigh shows how the language of poetry itself can revive and recuperate a sense of a future under the conditions of violence, social unrest, and global anxiety about the fate of the planet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Feb 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781644451670

Book preview

I

Youth

Smelling of sweet resin the Aleppo pines’

shadows grow taller by the hour. Two identical

twin boys chase each other through the shadows,

the one who’s ten minutes older yelling,

I’m gonna kill you! while the younger one

laughs, Kill me, kill me if you can!

Day by day these teatime mortars

keep pecking at the blast wall but the boys

have grown so used to it they keep on playing.

If they weren’t here in front of me, I’d find them

hard to imagine, just as I sometimes find

my own twin brother hard to imagine.

I’m supposed to be doing a story

on soldiers, what they do to keep from

being frightened, but all I can think about

is how Tim would chase me or I’d chase him

and we’d yell, I’m gonna kill you, just like

these brothers do, so alive in their bodies,

just as Tim who is so alive will one day not be:

will it be me or him who first dies?

But I came here to do a story on soldiers

and how they keep watching out for death

and manage to fight and die without going