From the internationally celebrated author of Fugitive Pieces and the Griffin Poetry Prize-shortlisted collection Correspondences—and Toronto’s Poet Laureate—comes a profoundly moving new collection of poetry of love and memory. In All We Saw, Anne Michaels returns to poetry with strikingly original lyrics to explore one of her essential concerns: “what love makes us capable of, and incapable of.” In this passionate, piercing short collection, dedicated to the late Mark Strand, Michaels explores “love’s dare / love’s repair / a single stitch.” In lyrics that ponder what happens to the bodies of lovers—so vital when together, different when apart, death coming to one before the other—she embraces both the intimacy and the vastness of the connection between two people. The complete and sheltering understanding of a great love is a powerful presence in all the poems, with its particular imagery (the ringing fog, the white page of the bed), as is the shattering loss of its end. Lyrics of various forms and two longer poems explore desire in a style chaste, spare, figuratively modulated, calm and almost classical in its precision. By the book’s end, we are left with a renewed awareness of the mystery at the core of our astonishing lives. With Michaels, we enter a space that is “not inside / nor outside: dusk’s / doorway,” where memory might be kept alive. About the Author: ANNE MICHAELS is the author of four highly acclaimed poetry collections: The Weight of Oranges, which won the Commonwealth Prize for the Americas; Miner’s Pond which received the Canadian Authors Association Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award; Skin Divers, and Correspondences, a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Her first novel, Fugitive Pieces, was an international bestseller and winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Guardian Fiction Award, and the Orange Prize for Fiction, among many other Canadian and international awards. Her second novel, The Winter Vault, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Trillium Book Award, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and a nominee for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her work has been translated into more than forty languages. In October 2015, she was named Toronto’s fifth Poet Laureate. |