Skin DiversSkin Divers is award-winning writer Anne Michaels’ dazzling third book of poems. These poems develop the concern with love, transience, and memory evident in her earlier work, and at the same time signal a definitive turning point towards a new thematic landscape. Michaels is a writer whose thoughts take shape in sensuous images, verbal music, and sinuous lines. Her short lyrics, like the longer monologues based on the lives of historical figures, explore an inner world fluid with feeling and memory. They reveal complex climates of emotion and sentiment, yet remain unsparing and unsentimental. As in the best poetry of our time, the luminous calm at the heart of her vision also registers the pressure of the darkness in our lives that has been momentarily withstood. These powerful poems, tense with desire and “divided longings,” remind us that Anne Michaels is among the most original poets of her generation. |
Contents
Skin Divers | 3 |
There Is No City That Does Not Dream | 16 |
The Second Search | 31 |
Fontanelles | 51 |
A Note on the Text | 65 |
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Common terms and phrases
ancient genetic information ANNE MICHAELS Ardlussa atoms belly Bièvre birds blood boat body broken burn Canzone Cells that know clothes cold colour damp dark daughter David Hawkes deck dream dusk everything eyes flesh floating flooded FONTANELLES forest genetic information shared grief hands HOODED HAWK Ice House invisible Irène islands Kathleen Scott knew Lascaux last apartment LAST NIGHT'S MOON legs light limestone look love wants Marie Curie memory metre a century Miner's Pond moonlight mouth never night field NIGHT GARDEN North Beach painted caves peat photograph Pierre Curie Poems quotation radium rain remember salt scent Second Search shadow shore SKIN DIVERS sleep slow sphagnum stars stone summer kitchen sweet Thanks thousand Three weeks tide tongues touch Tu Fu turn twist W. H. Auden wake walk waves Weight of Oranges wet grass white breath winter afternoon winter river word wife