Anne Michaels
Anne Michaels
Anne Michaelsis a Canadian poet and novelist. Michaels is the current poet laureate of Toronto, Canada. She is perhaps best known for her novel Fugitive Pieces which was adapted for film in 2007...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth15 April 1958
CountryCanada
darkness grace dresses
But sometimes the world disrobes, slips its dress off a shoulder, stops time for a beat. If we look up at that moment, it's not due to any ability of ours to pierce the darkness, it's the world's brief bestowal. The catastrophe of grace.
world ghost enough
Like other ghosts, she whispers; not for me to join her, but so that, when I'm close enough, she can push me back into the world.
psychological hiding share
To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
men glasses secret
When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.
lonely distance bird
Now we're like planets, holding to each other from a great distance. [...] Now we're hundreds of miles apart, our short arms keep us lonely, no one hears what's in my head. [...] It's March, even the birds don't know what to do with themselves.
rain poetry awkward
I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God. But all I achieved was awkward shrieking. Not even the pure shriek of a reed in the rain.
spiritual pain decision
...when we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain.
memories weather tree
Trees for example, carry the memory of rainfal. In their rings we read ancient weather - storms, sunlight and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.
matter ordinary moments
Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.
children believe grief
There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.
reading kissing veils
Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
stars blood want
If love wants you; if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills; with feathers and scales; with warm blood and cold.
dark sea cities
When you are alone - at sea, in the polar dark - an absence can keep you alive. The one you love maintains your mind. But when she's merely across the city, this is an absence that eats you to the bone.
philosophy moving sacrifice
Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications.