I wanted to read this poetry collection because Fugitive Pieces is one of my all time favourite books, and Anne Michaels did not disappoint.
Her writing is just so beautiful, and these poems about love (in the main) were fabulous and deep.

The author of the stunning Fugitive Pieces showcases her skill with language in this striking poetry collection which explores ideas of love and loss, mystery and desire.

As a writer of prose, Michaels use of language is stunning and her poetry doesn't disappoint.

This was fime, but I didn't find any of the poems to be anything special really and I probably wouldn't recommend it.

I’m often drawn to writing that acknowledges the awe one feels as an individual gazing at the universe but from an entirely secular perspective. The world and the fact of existence seems spectacular enough without attributing it to any grand design. (Nevertheless, I fully respect people who draw wisdom, comfort and community from different kinds of faith.) In her latest collection of poetry “All We Saw” it feels like Anne Michaels is beckoning the reader to join her on a spiritual journey that is entirely unconnected with religion. Her pared down poems describe the path of life as if travelling in a boat. She frequently makes pithy observations about the difficult process of cherishing our experiences without being too attached to them, especially with how this is done in writing and visual art. Her poems shift back and forth from the personal to the broadly objective to explore the tension of savouring what we love, but also learning to let it go.

The book begins and ends with longer poems, but smaller ones are sandwiched in between. The final poem in the fifth section ‘Ask Aloud’ struck me most as simulating something like a prayer. In the bold statement “To love another more than oneself. To know this is to know everything” Michaels seems to be forming a mantra through which to live. She asks a series of questions and rather than assuming there are answers she declares “Not surmise. Sunrise” as if certain kinds of truth can only be understood fully by looking at nature. Imagery of the natural world repeats and crops up in various poems where knowledge can be better gleaned from the physical world rather than through a process of deduction or received wisdom. The poem ‘You Meet the Gaze of a Flower’ also acts as a kind of entreaty or prayer about confronting life head on. Nature can also encompass a sense of emotion which can’t be expressed in words: “how much that hope hurt and yet purple dusk, yellow winter sky”. I love the way in which you’re suddenly thrust from a place of deep personal feeling into the expanse of a colourful skyline.

Point of view can shift in fascinating and moving ways throughout a single poem in Michaels’ writing. This probably occurs most dramatically in the poem ‘Bison’ where the description moves from the creation of a picture to inhabiting that picture to the dying artist who created the picture. The focus switches so fluidly it’s breathtaking to be drawn through it and creates a thoroughly unique resonance. This is very different from the blunt emotion to be found in ‘I Dreamed Again’ which describes how we can get lost in dream states where loved ones who are now deceased can physically exist in our lives again – something like what Joan Didion describes in her memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking.” Such longing for a connection with another is consistent with the existential panic that can result from absolute solitude. In her poem ‘Not’ she seems to assert that we possess innumerable uncertainties in life but we can be certain we are not alone when another person is with us. I also like speculating whether this poem is a play off from Samuel Beckett’s famous piece for the theatre ‘Not I’ and offers a different kind of answer from the loveless life of the narrator in that dramatic monologue.

The title poem which concludes the book touches back on water imagery found in the beginning. It also harkens back to a kind of communal spiritual practice where she states “we had only to bend our heads as if reading the same book open between us”. To surmise that the same truth about all the manifold experiences and emotions of life can be understood by looking at the natural world is a beautifully optimistic one. Yet, I also like how she seems to intimate that horizons can create a false belief. A skyline gives the illusion that there is an endpoint when in actuality it will continue on no matter how much you run towards it – just like our images of future happiness will inevitably dissolve because we will always desire more. The book “All We Saw” is a beautifully spare and artful creation.

Michaels’ fifth collection of verse is divided into six sections, with several composed of just one long poem. As in “Somewhere Night Is Falling,” many of the poems are built around a repeated phrase – here literally every line begins with “Somewhere,” imagining all the disparate life experiences that are occurring simultaneously around the world. Love and loss, art and the sea are recurring topics. The repetition makes this rather hypnotic collection pass quickly, but its details have already started to fade for me.

Fugitive Pieces is one of my favourite books, lyrical and moving it has such a poetic style that after reading it for the first time I immediately went and read the poetry collections; The Weight of Oranges and Miner's Pond. In this, her latest collection it is clear that Michaels has lost none of the poetic power that moved me all those years ago. This work is freighted with the effects of grief and love on a person. Most interestingly for me is the constant sense of movement in the work between the states. We see the chasms between emotional states. We see what happens when all the emotions pile up at once and we buckle under the weight. Everything in the poems is in flux, time, memory, feelings - and the words ride this movement with such raw grace and beauty I found myself in tears.

Anne Michaels achingly raw and passionate prose ponders the connection between two people. A captivating book of poems reflecting on the turbulence of emotion that love evokes. Thank you to Bloomsbury Publishing for giving me a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I'm not much of a poetry person, but I really liked this. It felt powerful, and raw - it was evocative, and there were a lot in there that stood out to me - 'somewhere night is falling' & 'ask aloud' are my top picks though.

The intricate storytelling through these poems about love and loss make for a tough read. Brutal and honest about the joys and blows in the rollercoaster of a relationship as it plays out.

Poems to relate and commiserate to.

Many thanks to the publishers for allowing me to review this book for them!