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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
James McMichael is one of the finest poets of his generation. Like Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky, he studied at Stanford with Ivor Winters during the late 1960s, when the Vietnam War was at its height. And like his former master, McMichael is a difficult poet to get hold of. The language in The World at Large tends to be sparse, making its impact through narrative twists and turns rather than individual lines. Yet a little patience on the reader's part will disclose a powerful, if subtle, craft at work.
From Publishers Weekly
In this mix of three new poems plus work from four previous books, McMichael, for better and worse, proves himself an intense and gifted renderer of detail. "The Vegetables," from 1971, are stuffed with creepy personifications?an asparagus with "his crowns already tender, his spine giving in." The graceful and effective long poem "Each in a Place Apart" breathes freshness into the familiar crisis of a writer's entanglement with a younger woman, an ensuing divorce and years of doubt and lust. Internal monologues and small, captured moments instill honesty: "There's time for movies, now, and double solitaire. We wrestle." But in a case of overkill, the book's centerpiece, a nearly 2000-line morass titled "Four Good Things," attempts to expound on the death, from cancer, of the poet's mother. The poem is so densely packed with precise and prosaic details, there is little room for emotion, let alone charged language. The volume's title is a change-up, for McMichael's attention is leveled not at the big picture but at the world's infinite parts.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
See all Editorial Reviews
James McMichael is one of the finest poets of his generation. Like Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky, he studied at Stanford with Ivor Winters during the late 1960s, when the Vietnam War was at its height. And like his former master, McMichael is a difficult poet to get hold of. The language in The World at Large tends to be sparse, making its impact through narrative twists and turns rather than individual lines. Yet a little patience on the reader's part will disclose a powerful, if subtle, craft at work.
The 10-page-long "Itinerary" shows McMichael's early mastery of the long poem. Still, this beautifully modulated work seems like a dry run when we turn to a mature production like "Four Good Things." In this sequence, the poet interweaves the history of Pasadena with that of his own family, and the overall effect is devastating: it's one of the great American long poems. It's also one of the few poems that capture Southern California's sleazy grandeur:
Someone from Los Angeles brought in a telephone.Another book-length sequence, "Each in a Place Apart," alternates long and short sections to narrate the disintegration of the poet's marriage--brutally, painfully, truthfully, but with sparing use of the first person pronoun. Like most of McMichael's work, the effect is altogether personal without being in the least confessional, and it works most powerfully on the subliminal level: the reader is moved without ever quite knowing how it was done. --Mark Rudman
He hooked it up in the store on the southeast corner,
rode back downtown and called and asked for
so-and-so, who wasn't there.
From Publishers Weekly
In this mix of three new poems plus work from four previous books, McMichael, for better and worse, proves himself an intense and gifted renderer of detail. "The Vegetables," from 1971, are stuffed with creepy personifications?an asparagus with "his crowns already tender, his spine giving in." The graceful and effective long poem "Each in a Place Apart" breathes freshness into the familiar crisis of a writer's entanglement with a younger woman, an ensuing divorce and years of doubt and lust. Internal monologues and small, captured moments instill honesty: "There's time for movies, now, and double solitaire. We wrestle." But in a case of overkill, the book's centerpiece, a nearly 2000-line morass titled "Four Good Things," attempts to expound on the death, from cancer, of the poet's mother. The poem is so densely packed with precise and prosaic details, there is little room for emotion, let alone charged language. The volume's title is a change-up, for McMichael's attention is leveled not at the big picture but at the world's infinite parts.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
See all Editorial Reviews
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
She bore only the heart, Worked at the stem with her Fingers, pulling it to her, And into her, like a cord. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
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She bore only the heart, Worked at the stem with her Fingers, pulling it to her, And into her, like a cord. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Cal Tech New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 3
books:
2
books
cite this book:
- Four Good Things: Poetry by James McMichael on 4 pages
- Each in a Place Apart (Phoenix Poets Series) by James McMichael in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and Front Matter (3)
- Against the Falling Evil by James McMichael in Front Matter
- The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide by Robert Pinsky in Back Matter
- The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide by Robert Pinsky in Back Matter
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