Poems [Hardcover]

Anne Michaels (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 4, 2000

Prior to her stunning first novel, Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels had already won awards and critical acclaim for two books of poetry: The Weight of Oranges (1986), which won the Commonwealth Prize for the Americas, and Miner's Pond (1991), which received the Canadian Authors Association Award and was short-listed for the Governor General's Award and the Trillium Award. Although they were published separately, these two books, along with Skin Divers, a collection of Michaels's newest work, were written as companion volumes.

Poems brings all three books together for the first time, creating for American readers a wonderful introduction to Anne Michaels's poetry. Meditative and insightful, powerful and heart-moving, these are poems that, as Michael Ondaatje has written, "go way beyond games or fashion or politics . . . They represent the human being entire."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Three collections of poems by novelist Michaels (Fugitive Pieces) have been brought together for their first U.S. publication: The Weight of Oranges, Miner's Pond and Skin Divers. As the sensuousness of these titles suggests, Michaels goes for a portentous lyric well-stocked with physical details, action verbs, simile and metaphor--"we are black smudges on the frozen river"; "We were sent for a reason,/ like curtains blown in from an open window/ to knock over a cup." When she writes from a perspective one assumes to be her own ("Miner's Pond"; "Words for the Body"), Michaels's lush and elliptical narratives are winning. Increasingly, her poems take historical figures and their lovers as subjects and speakers, echoing her work in historical fiction, and including Alfred Doblin, Johannes Kepler, Karen Blixen, Amedeo Modigliani, Anna Akhmatova and Marie Curie. These poems don't always carry the freight of their subjects' fame lightly, though, and by the book's second half the metaphors begin to misfire as bad homages, as in the Akhmatovesque "Birds plunge their cries like needles/ into the thick arm of afternoon." The worst merely recap generic moments of pathos in a tone more borrowed from biography than reanimated by sympathy. Fans of fellow Canadian and Knopf novelist-poet Michael Ondaatje may find much to admire here though, and the better poems should find a significant audience. (Jan.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

It's no surprise that the author of the richly evocative novel Fugitive Pieces is also a poet. Michaels had, in fact, published two collections of poetry in her native Canada before that novel gained recognition in the United States. Both of these collections, along with a third, newer one, are included in Poems. A poet of unabashedly Romantic predilections, Michaels creates dreamscapes that frequently draw on the staples of 1960s "Deep Image" poetry: light, the moon, stars, the sea. But she takes pains to imagine a corresponding physicality or consciousness that lives within the vocabulary of her moonlit surroundings: "Waterworn, the body remembers/ like a floodplain, sentiment-laden,/ reclaims itself with every tide." Objects of perception are internalized and integrated with the subject: "Like the moon, I want to touch places/ just by looking." In quantity, though, this assimilative method grows somewhat thick, if not awkward, and the most striking passages are more often direct ("If you love a man who's not your husband,/ your life becomes the story everyone else tells") than willfully "poetic." Recommended for large collections.
-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (January 4, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375401407
• ISBN-13: 978-0375401404
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,691,097 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Anne Michaels's first novel was the international best seller Fugitive Pieces, now a major motion picture. It won several awards, including the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Guardian Fiction Award, and the Orange Prize for Fiction. Michaels is also the author of three highly acclaimed poetry collections. She lives in Toronto.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A companion volume to 'Fugitive Pieces'?, October 15, 2000

By 

Paul Sendziuk (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Poems (Hardcover)

It is seductive to read Anne Michaels' collected poems as a companion piece to her breath-taking debut novel 'Fugitive Pieces', a fictionialised first-hand account of a young poet who learns how to articulate the horror of his family's past and find redemption though language and the love of a woman. The novel's protagonist writes poems about the persistence of memory, the burden of surviving the Holocaust, and the need for human connection, and a number of poems in this volume explore similar themes. As in 'Fugitive Pieces', Michaels also draws upon her impressive understanding of disparate disciplines including Antarctic exploration, music, geology and mathematics, to make her points. It is as if she has penned a small encyclopedia.

I know of no encyclopedia that can match Michael's liquid turn of phrase, however. Michaels' words fill one's mouth like cold plums: they have a crisp earthy simplicity yet gloriously ooze at the bite.

The underlying theme of many of the poems, as in 'Fugitive Pieces', is the struggle to accept the absurdity of the human condition: the manner in which we are nourished by love, and crave it, yet are inevitably crippled by it when a loved one dies. As Michaels writes in the poem 'Memorium': "The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love...We are orphaned, one by one".

The verse which comprise 'Poems' were originally published in three separate volumes over the space of 13 years, and Michaels has clearly developed her voice in this time. While the earlier poems of `The Weight of Oranges' are taught and linear, there is something less hurried about the latter poems of `Skin Divers'. One experiences the sublime sustained pause between the black marks on her page, which contributes depth to her lyric (to coin a musical metaphor which Michaels might well appreciate given her fascination with the piano and the secrets which its playing reveals). The difference between the earlier poems and the latter can be explained by the poet's confidence to dwell a little longer in the image, to explore its possibilities, and to play with cadence and sound.

Each of the poems share, however, Michaels' admirable ability to make the everyday remarkable. She writes of salt, stone and peat, and of mistaking the sea for the sky (in the poem 'Near Ashdod'), yet enables these objects to articulate the yearnings of the human heart. At other times, she finds words and images to articulate the extraordinary - the horrific and ethereal - in terms with which the reader can readily identify. Thus we come to know the psychological scars of a Holocaust survivor and the mind of a Nobel Prize winning physicist mourning her husband. Michaels brings alive events and people - poets, writers, painters, and mathematicians - who have long been dead and makes them breathe again. It is for this reason that I asked my History students to read 'Fugitive Pieces', and will have no hestitation in recommending that they delve into Anne Michaels' book of Poems.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Interstices, June 1, 2004

By 

Keith Bickerstaffe "keithbickerstaffe" (Clearwater, Fl) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Poems (Paperback)

Anne Michael's poetry strikes me at the heart to be very sensuous. She sees right through to the elemental depths of love. I particularly like the way she explores the many levels of our human condition. She is by no means a binary thinker, but a skilfull scientist of life. I don't recall the title, but there is one piece where she describes love as breathing not only through lungs but through gills...where love is so completely overwhelming that it blinds the senses to everything else. She literally takes my breath away...