Customer Reviews

Capacity: Poems

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this is a tensely wound poem of extraordinary trnasparency that seeks to understand real human experience while exploring ideas of truth, time and place. I respect it very much and also enjoyed it. It's a thrilling work.

Prize winning author James McMichael returns with a book after many years of silence, spent teaching and administering a poetry MFA program at one of California's leading universities. CAPACITY has earned him the coveted poetry nomination from the National Book Awards, which has puzzled many poetry fans, considering the work here isn't his best. However I suppose we are grateful to have another book from a man whom many considered long on the shelf. In years to come perhaps we will look back on this volume and see in it a dramatic change in McMichael's somewhat ponderous manner? His main inspirations as a poet seem to be John Milton's PARADISE REGAINED and Robert Frost's MASQUE OF REASON (1945) and MASQUE OF MERCY (1947), so it is fitting that his new book opens with a lengthy meditation on a book of photographs called THE BRITISH COUNTRYSIDE IN PICTURES.

McMichael wants us all to think about how much of our visual memory is drawn from photography, and expressions like "Market Day" also ring a sort of sonic bell for people who might never even have visited the UK. Like Rosebud, this book of photos has a mysterious hold over the narrator of these seven linked poems, who sees himself hypnotized by these photos aa a child, newly fresh from "the mother's aperture" and on a Lacanian voyage towards self-hood, striving to reach past the protoplasm stage of the fetus, when all he did was "feed and make waste."

Thus experiencing the British countryside, even in pictures, is an important step for the boy. The cunning cover image cleverly puts this in perspective. Elsewhere McMichael waxes and wanes in wisdom. Sometimes he's right on, otherwise he's so pretentious you think he must be pulling your leg. The image of the mouth is genuinely stirring. Did you know the first thing a baby has is a mouth, then lips form round it. For the boy is always wanting something, that is his first need. But otherwise it's all blanket statements from an Ask Mr Wizard sort of talking head in a TV documentary: "Until given out later as what has been/ risen from,/ / origin has not happened."