Poems

Rating:
Summary: Interstices
Review: 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...

Rating:
Summary: A companion volume to 'Fugitive Pieces'?
Review: 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.