Skin Divers (Hardcover)

Anne Michaels is best known for her blend of historical inquiry and passionate exploration of the personal, and her third collection of poetry, Skin Divers, develops those preoccupations in 13 poems about love, bereavement, and the past. At times, the heavily sensuous language of Michaels's lyrical poems obstructs their effectiveness; she can become too taken with an image to ask if it makes sense. Fortunately, these missteps are fairly rare and are made up for by the intermittent music of lines like

Minarets of burdock clang in the copper marsh, the grapes' frozen skins flood with sweetness.

As in her first two collections, brought together in The Weight of Oranges/Miner's Pond, Michaels's longer poems, which plunge into history (returning to Marie Curie, visiting Lascaux) and roll through extended dramatic monologues, are her most effective. She often uses a plainer style for these pieces, occasionally risking the tedium of unadorned free verse but usually keeping her language visual enough to hold the poem's intensity. These poems work in tandem with Michaels's fiction, and are likely to delight fans of her best-selling, Orange Prize-winning novel, Fugitive Pieces. There is nothing surprising about Skin Divers, but, as a cautious expansion of Michaels's familiar territory, it is an intriguing, sometimes intoxicating volume. --Jack Illingworth

Praise for Skin Divers:

“Anne Michaels’ third collection of poetry continues the work of her groundbreaking 1996 novel, Fugitive Pieces. Readers who know Michaels through her novel alone will recognize the striking lyricism of Skin Divers. A profound interest in language – she excavates words for sounds and meaning – and powerful images are evident in her prose and poetry alike. Michaels’ work is marked by intense engagement with her various subjects and a belief in the redemptive quality of language to transform – even radically alter – experience.… Skin Divers celebrates love’s myriad forms.”
–Quill & Quire

“Skin Divers seeks to explore the overwhelming experiences for which we have no words, to readdress the failure of language to convey emotion and idea.…Michaels] is capable of tremendous lyrical precision and writes with a freshness of image and idea that is rarely matched in contemporary writing.”
–The Scotsman

“Skin Divers, a series of mediations on the intensity of love, has an intimacy at times so tender it hurts.…”
–The Times (U.K.)

“Stunning…Michaels is a poet of light and rain, the body and the mind, and she brings something new to every facet of life she ponders.”
–Booklist

“Couples profound intellect with deeply felt emotion…a volume of intensely felt emotional truth, strengthened by intellectual rigor and haunting imagery.”
–Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Where will a reader find the weather and texture of the inner life given such vivid, exact articulation? Reading Skin Divers, you know that its language has been a listening for a very long time; that the voice is, even as it speaks across the page, mostly an ear, and the words distillates of silence. Each searching metaphor moves with a delicate, feline fierceness, so that insights arrive with heart-stopping conviction. This is a book to be grateful for, to read, and be read by, slowly.”
–Don McKay

“Anne Michaels’ poems are like imagined lakes on which she navigates with a fluid and moving logic. These lyrical narratives float on their own transparent surfaces with precision, tenderness, liquidity.”
–Lucie Brock-Broido, author of The Master Letters and A Hunger

“Evocative, full, deeply felt, the long, rangy narratives snake through the book, weaving a large tapestry so very like a true life – that is, she makes her story feel as if it's ours. The poems are relentless in their need to dig, to unearth the truth behind memory.”
–Dan Halpern, author of Something Shining