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.
