Skin Divers [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

There is something mesmerising and unattainable at once about Skin Divers, Anne Michaels' first poetry collection since the astounding success of her novel, Fugitive Pieces in 1997. It is as beautiful and engaging as "the dark unlocking", the way she describes the photograph the lovers take of night waves in the last poem. The concerns of love and loss recur in this volume as she brings "the chemistry of looking" to human passion. Michaels moves gracefully between the exact drawing of an image, "Frozen sparklers of Queen Anne's lace", which has painterly precision, to a more diagrammatic approach, as scientific as a clutch of model atoms, "A jagged tube of ions pins us to the sky". She keenly explores the point where atomism and animism meet, exquisitely caught in "Fontanelles" as she waits for dark, "impossible to record", the moment day becomes night or embryo becomes foetus. Darkness is a dominant theme and yet for Michaels, "love's dark field" is restorative rather than gloomy. One character's voice is "more distinct in darkness", while another sees renewal in the night: "The same loneliness that closes us / opens us again. Like hair loosened by the sea, / slowly the darkness opens into darkness."

Michaels reminds us that we live in darkness as much as in light and "dark with hope" is a powerful and refreshing repositioning of metaphor. The irreducibility of love is well observed in "Into Arrival", where two lovers are reunited and "when he finds her / there is room at last / for everyone they love" and their love, because it is broken from love is "like thesea/from the sea". "Last Night's Moon" allows her paradoxical genius full rein, from the setting up of the rhythm of the "Unbroken/ broken sea", tothe hands which manipulate "in the darkness, silver bromide / of desire darkening skin with light." The words "If love wants you" are repeated like a caveat, until she strikes with "If love wants you, suddenly your past / is obsolete science". It is no surprise that Michaels was drawn to scientist Marie Curie and her "glowing distillation of time" as a persona for a later poem in the book. This is a wonderful journey into love's fantastic work and the body's material comprehension of it. --Cherry Smyth

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 -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Gebundene Ausgabe .