All We Saw

Poems of elegy in the aftermath of a great love from the internationally best-selling, award-winning novelist (Fugitive Pieces, The Winter Vault) and poet.

In All We Saw, Anne Michaels returns with strikingly original poems to explore one of her essential concerns: "what love makes us capable of, and incapable of." Here are the ways in which passion must accept, must insist, that "death . . . give / not only take from us." This piercing short collection treats desire in a style that is chaste, spare, figuratively modulated, and almost classical in its precision. 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--Michaels embraces both the intimacy and the vastness of the connection between two people. Love's sheltering understanding 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. With Michaels, we enter a space that is "not inside / not outside: dusk's / doorway," where memory might be kept alive.

“"Deeply felt . . . Like assembled fragments from an ancient Greek lyricist, [Michaels's] latest collection coheres to form a spare plaintive elegy for deceased friends and lovers." --Fred Muratori, Library Journal”

“Deeply felt . . . Like assembled fragments from an ancient Greek lyricist, [Michaels’s] latest collection coheres to form a spare plaintive elegy for deceased friends and lovers.” —Fred Muratori, Library Journal

ANNE MICHAELS is the author of the multiple prizewinner Fugitive Pieces, which was made into a major motion picture, and a second novel, The Winter Vault, which 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. She is also the author of several highly acclaimed poetry volumes, the selected volume Poems, and, most recently, Correspondences. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages.

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