Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Why I loved this book.,
This review is from: Reviewing the Skull (Paperback)
"Reviewing the Skull" is a beautiful book. These are heavy poems, most of them, but enlivened with so much wit and humor.
For instance, there's the poem ("Ghostkill") in which a friend pauses while speaking to someone else on the phone, and, placing her hand over the mouthpiece, says to the speaker, "He thought you died last summer." "Is it safe/ to laugh?" she asks herself: Can she--should she--laugh at the mistake, given that, under the circumstances (Michaels is a five-time ovarian cancer patient)it's not really so surprising an error? What does it mean to say that laughter is "safe"? That we are tough enough, resilient enough, to take this in? Perhaps. And the question is followed by a wonderful riff on how it feels to be thought dead. Yet in one of my very favorite poems, the opening "Cancer Muse," the speaker, in an imaginary dialogue with her dead mother, argues with a mother who tells her she's "writing too much about breath . . . Anyone would think/a body never breathed before." She should "give [her] mind to harder things, "like laughter." This is not a book that endorses the sort of laughter that comes from a "stiff upper lip," that assures us if we just look on the bright side of things all will be well. There are poems here that will make you rage at unthinking doctors (and I've been there) who are kind when the news is good but become brusque and even cruel just when one needs them the most, when the news is bad. And there are poems here that have nothing to do with cancer at all, except that they're informed by the wish to make every day, every moment, count. Like the description of a drive on the way to a couples' house for dinner, where the speaker and her husband imagine it will be just the two couples together--real, important conversation--and then it's not. Michaels' eye and ear for the banality in which so much that takes place in our lives is set never fails her. And a poem about the Gee Bend exhibition of quilters at the Whitney a few years ago. No sentimentality here: we see the hard lives of the women who made these quilts, but also perhaps a different kind of hardness in our own lives that creates a hunger for what they have. This is a book to read and reread. I know I'll be coming back to it often.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Life Courage,
By Patricia M. Johnson (Spring Valley, CA, US) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Reviewing the Skull (Paperback)
Reviewing the Skull: Poems by Judy Rowe Michaels (Cincinnati: Word Tech Editions, 2010)
This is Judy Michaels' second book of poetry and shares many concerns with the first (The Forest of Wild Hands. Gainesville, FL: Univ. Press of Florida, 2001): a sense of discovery and community in the classroom, death of loved ones, grief, one's own mortality, as well as beginnings and endings in general, exhibited in variegated moods, moments of wit, and surprises of language. But there is a darker emphasis here, as the cancer survivor has had to endure several recurrences. There is more a feeling of living on the edge, of living with an even greater sense of urgency and poignancy, both individually and communally. The direct honesty of these poems in confronting death and the fear of death is one of their outstanding characteristics. For instance, "Birdwriting" acknowledges the mind's unsuccessful evasions--like a "robin's skitter"--of the thought of cancer's return. In "To Picasso's 'Melancholy Woman,'" the fear is focused: "All you can do is watch for me to give/your pooled blues the weight of mortal fear." Death and endings are often seen together with life and beginnings. In "Spring Outburst" we read "Rhythms of God,/ when a cell sparks and blooms, renewing/ last spring's tumor. . . ." In a very touching poem, "Memento Mori," an old photo taken in front of the piano by the poet's parents is described: the way "My face, age two,/beams back such love for hers,/the lens between us melts." The room is filled--party dress, stuffed animals, favorite blanket: enough favorite things to accompany a "she-pharaoh" to the grave. "I can hear/a muffled, pale-blue whisper:/'Keep me with you./I'll wrap your naked body/at the end.'" Another defining feature of this collection is the expanding of sympathy, solidarity, and nurture felt for and with another person, a wider community of people--and, by extension, humanity as a whole--concerning mortality and the kind of urgent living prompted by a true awareness of mortality. "Introducing the Skull" shows, with moving colloquial ease, a naturally resistant class of highschoolers being drawn into such an experience with the poet-teacher. Elsewhere, the random group in "Advent Lambs" becomes "a congregation"--the Christ-lamb, the mother and child, the cancer-scarred woman without a womb. A random congregation also arises among the passangers on the boat in "Whale Watch," becoming "one vast orgasm of whale," before the group again subsides into separate existences. In some poems a variation in tone, including wit and humor, appear to pronounced effect. The same poem ("Advent Lambs") that has the line "goats,/who licked paint off the Holy Family" also has "I was pregnant/again with cancer, my womb long gone,/dark miracle." "Whale Watch" modulates between the mundane and the grand. For instance, the middle of the poem shows the great upwelling of the whale becoming all the more exhilarating because of the amusing self-deprecation that precedes it: expected was "a minor troubling of the waves/that I'd be sure to miss, the way I always/look in exactly the wring part of the sky when a star/shoots." Then comes the great event. But these differences in tone are mostly seen in a surprising range of moods and subjects from poem to poem. We find the enveloping warmth and charm of the poet observing the young girl in "Morning at the Irish Coffeehouse," the jags of language mirroring jazz in "Jazz Sister," the scurrying and jumping anxieties, the odd leaps of metaphors in "Waiting Again for Surgery," and other varied examples. The language itself in these poems is concentrated, sometimes simple, sometimes, as in the dream-like progress of the last-mentioned poem, with surprising shifts and images: "mind isn't sleeping well,/wakes each hour or else dreams trips on stationary trains/ across black-edged snow where a man in a powdered wig/plays fugues on a glass harmonica and there's no/anesthesia . . . ." One characteristic that lends an especially intense feeling to almost all of these poems is the kind of understatement that makes the reader feel the strentgh and unsayable emotions behind the words. "At Cafe Muse, for my brother (l951-2005)" is a case in point. "Dear Tim, the bars are mahogany," it begins, as the sights and the food of a favorite seaside restaurant quietly evoke the dead brother. Then a barely restrained concussion of grief hits, increasing the pressure of emotion in the scene: How many years before you'd take your life? I'm eating pricey tuna here, soy-glazed with ginger, in your honor, not the pesto pasta. You'd like the service, solicitous, not pushy. In fact, it's that I'm crying over. Solicitude is hard to take these days. I'm here to write, and you're here too--in the wine, the fish, my hurt, it's all honoring you, including those white sails, so far off I can't tell if they're still r moving. The last two lines, here so gently understated, seem to relieve the feeling and take it out to the greater world beyond the personal. In this poem the tone is varied, the total effect one of restrained intensity. As in this poem, the prime subject of this book is the transmutation of adversity--often the prospect of death and the deaths of others--into living bravely, into placing personal pain into the larger ebb and flow of existence, into feeling solidarity with others confronting adversity. A distinctive voice is present to tell us about these things in a great variety of ways. It's urge is to "send the secret out to sea," while never flinching from the creative space "where mind's at home/whatever/the omen." Reviewer Ed Becker
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Profoundly Moving Volume of Poetry,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Reviewing the Skull (Paperback)
"Reviewing the Skull" by Judy Rowe Michaels is one of my favorite books of poetry. Written in deceptively simple English prosody, in an unencumbered vocabulary, free of cryptic or esoteric allusions, this 2010 volume of poetry has a profundity and a rawness that will move the hardest heart to both want more poetry by Judy Rowe Michaels and to pursue the reading of more modern poetry.
Not exactly an easy book to read, despite the easy language, the poems in Reviewing the Skull force the reader to look as honestly and as courageously as Michaels does at personal loss, the cancer epidemic, the numbing nightmare of being a victim of cancer--and for five times, the constant clinical experience of being a patient--and that of a returning and returning and returning and retuning cancer patient, to the ubiquitous sense of death cancer carries with it. There are also poems of touching tenderness in memory and appreciation, too, but it is best to let the poet's words speak for themselves. There is a frightening honesty in such lines as "The sudden lights, needles, smells/are mine, too, but morning always comes,/so far." There is a savage ominous beauty with a poignant awareness of how life-altering a single cancer cell's appearance is in such lines as "...when a cell sparks and booms, renewing/last spring's tumor, miniature Nagasaki,/the cloud opened like a fiery flower/and birds came tumbling down." In a loving poem of appreciation entitled "Jazz Sister," for her jazz sister, she concludes, "It's courage music, that says anything/is possible, fluke, flinch, sharp, flat,/slow dance up the mountain,/maples to birch to pine, deep woods/or a sudden clearing./You play/the light and shadow as they fall." Michaels often writes with exquisite perceptivity as when she gazes into the eyes of a girl in a coffee house: "Her eyes are a quite as stones beneath/water whose blue is a miraculous gloss/on the hidden." Here the reader will find homage to such figures as Agnes Martin, Kenneth Koch and Harry Partch--and Michaels' own mother. And the reader will find painfully poignant poetry to the memory of her late brother, Tim, tragically a suicide. Of him, Michaels writes, "And now I can't/undo the dark you've made." A visit to the family homestead for Christmas leads her to write of herself and of her siblings, "...a shared inheritance of wood and water." Elsewhere when writing about a valley where she discovered echoes, she remembers, "I could/make distance speak." The images are profound in their simplicity. A volume of tender observation and occasional resignation or acceptance, there are also brutal truths. "Last year I was pregnant/again, with my cancer, my womb long gone,/dark miracle. How to remove an emptiness." Another woman who wants to be rid of her tumor she likens to a fetus needing to be born from her, or of the poet herself, "in love with the lesion on my liver." The poet takes a recording of Brahms' Third Symphony into an MRI, and writes elsewhere, "I have what he died of." But, "For the moment, nothing dies." Of course there are other volumes of poetry written by poets with serious illness. This volume is, however, accessible--painful and tender in moments, but without the often intimidating medical language of such poets as Tory Dent. Michaels writes, "My body's a nest/for cancer" in the poem, "Saint Luke's Garden, Hudson Street" the day before another surgery. Maybe. Sadly. Unfairly. Nevertheless, Michaels' poetry is a place for courage and quiet brilliance.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
