The Weight of Oranges / Miner's Pond [Paperback]

The success of Anne Michaels's first novel, Fugitive Pieces, which won both the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction, led quickly to the reissue of her first two collections of poetry, The Weight of Oranges and Miner's Pond. Like her fiction, Michaels's poetry is passionate, intensely visual, and historically aware, and readers who enjoyed Fugitive Pieces will find much of interest here.

The Weight of Oranges, first published in 1985, is, unfortunately, not a strong collection. Michaels's talent is clear but undeveloped, and her poems, despite their luminous details, are rife with pedestrian metaphors and similes that disrupt the energy of the verse. 1991's Miner's Pond, however, redeems the volume, for it is a much tighter and more accomplished collection. Much of it revolves around writers, artists, and scientists (from Osip Mandelstam and Isak Dinesen to Johannes Kepler), especially their experiences of exile or civil repression. Here, Michaels strikes an effective balance between intense imagery and simple statements of the mechanics of life, as in this stanza from "A Lesson from the Earth," her poem about Kepler:

I saw my first eclipse when I was nine, above Emmendingen, the moon rising from the clouds like an infant's head in its web of blood; the last time I held my father's hand.

Michaels often treats art and science as equivalent modes of experience. Both value the visionary imagination over the simple acceptance of things as they are said to be. Her transformative sensibility gives the best of these poems a rare force; a sense of the past is retained even in the most autobiographical pieces, such as the title poem of Miner's Pond, which ends: "Our blood is time." --Jack Illingworth

Prior to her stunning début novel, Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels had already won prizes and acclaim for her two poetry collections. The Weight of Oranges and Miner’s Pond are now brought back into print in this one-volume collector’s edition.

Published in 1986, The Weight of Oranges created a sensation, garnering the kind of praise rarely accorded a first book of poems. It went on to win the Commonwealth Prize for the Americas. Miner’s Pond appeared in 1991 and received the Canadian Authors Association Award, and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award and the Trillium Award.

Anne Michaels is the author of three highly acclaimed poetry collections: The Weight of Oranges (1986), which won the Commonwealth Prize for the Americas; Miner’s Pond (1991), which received the Canadian Authors Association Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award (these two volumes were published in a single-volume edition in 1997); and Skin Divers (1999).

Fugitive Pieces (1996) is Anne Michaels’ multi-award-winning, internationally bestselling first novel. In Canada, it was #1, and on the national bestseller list for more than two years. The literary prizes the novel has garnered to date are: In Canada, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award; the City of Toronto Book Award; the Martin & Beatrice Fischer Award; the Trillium Book Award; and an Award of Merit from Heritage Toronto. In the U.K., the Guardian Fiction Award; the Jewish Quarterly Prize for Fiction; and the Orange Prize for Fiction. In the U.S., the Harold Ribalow Award and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. And in Italy, Giuseppe Acerbi Literary Award.

Anne Michaels lives in Toronto, where she is working on her next novel.


From the Hardcover edition.

PHANTOM LIMBS

“The face of the city changes more quickly, alas! than the mortal heart.”
- Charles Baudelaire

So much of the city
is our bodies. Places in us
old light still slants through to.
Places that no longer exist but are full of feeling,
like phantom limbs.

Even the city carries ruins in its heart.
Longs to be touched in places
only it remembers.

Through the yellow hooves
of the ginkgo, parchment light;
in that apartment where I first
touched your shoulders under your sweater,
that October afternoon you left keys
in the fridge, milk on the table.
The yard — our moonlight motel —
where we slept summer’s hottest nights,
on grass so cold it felt wet.
Behind us, freight trains crossed the city,
a steel banner, a noisy wall.
Now the hollow diad
floats behind glass
in office towers also haunted
by our voices.

Few buildings, few lives
are built so well
even their ruins are beautiful.
But we loved the abandoned distillery:
stone floors cracking under empty vats,
wooden floors half rotted into dirt,
stairs leading nowhere, high rooms
run through with swords of dusty light.
A place the rain still loved, its silver paint
on rusted things that had stopped moving it seemed, for us.
Closed rooms open only to weather,
pungent with soot and molasses,
scent-stung. A place
where everything too big to take apart
had been left behind.