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 truth 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