Anne Michaels is a Canadian poet and novelist, best known for her sympathetic and sensitive treatments of controversial issues, and her seemingly innate ability to find beauty even in hopelessness and despair and sublimate it into eloquent, lyrical writing. Her style is sometimes reminiscent of that of Margaret Atwood minus the cynicism; sometimes it is entirely different, and always it is beautiful.
Born in Toronto in 1958, where she continues to live, and educated at the University of Toronto, Michaels taught creative writing courses for some time before becoming a published and acclaimed author herself.
She has written and had published three collections of poetry: The Weight of Oranges (1986), for which she won the Commonwealth Prize for the Americas; Miner's Pond (1991), winning the Canadian Authors Association Award and short-listed for both the Governor General's Prize and the Trillium Award. Both collections have been re-released in a single volume, entitled (unsurprisingly) The Weight of Oranges/Miner's Pond, and published by McClelland & Stewart. Her third volume, Skin Divers, was published in 1999.
Between Miner's Pond and Skin Divers came Michaels' first venture into prose: a novel, Fugitive Pieces, which explores the nature of loss, faith, and love in the context of life during and after the Holocaust, in Greece and later in Canada. In it, Michaels incorporates scientific allusions -- geology and meteorology used as objective correlatives for human experience, Shackleton's Antarctic expedition -- and fragments of history to lend a feeling of relevance and authenticity to what is otherwise fictitious; the elements combine together perfectly to create a work of startlingly clear vision that manages to be painful and sympathetic and heart-wrenching simultaneously.
All this, of course, underlined and accentuated by Michaels' uniquely elegant prose. In places, individual phrases and sentences seem as though they are fragments of poems themselves. It's the type of novel that must be read and absorbed to be believed.
Fugitive Pieces met with critical acclaim. It was short-listed for both the Giller Prize and the Canadian Booksellers Association Author of the Year Award, winning the Trillium Prize, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Beatrice and Martin Fischer Award, and the Orange Prize. Rights to it have been sold to 19 countries; Canadian director Jeremy Podeswa is currently at work on creating a film version.
To write a work of this nature and magnitude required a great deal of research and preparation; Michaels spent nearly a decade reading memoirs of Holocaust victims and survivors and absorbing aspects of natural sciences that could be incorporated into background for the novel. On researching and writing and later presenting to a wider audience, Michaels had this to say:
When you put a tremendous amount of love into your work, as in any relationship, you can't know -- you can only hope -- that what you're offering will in some way be received. You shape your love to artistic demands, to the rigors of your genre. But still, it's a labour of love, and it's the nature of love that you must give it freely.
Where her novel has a wider focus on greater truths, much of Michaels' poetry centres on the value of the mundane and fleeting moments that make one long for permanence; moonlight reflected in a pond, the beauty of women on a windswept beach, the worn and familiar intimacy of time spent with a lover.
There's another skin inside my skin
that gathers to your touch, a lake to the light;
that looses its memory, its lost language
into your tongue,
erasing me into newness.
Just when the body thinks it knows
the ways of knowing itself,
this second skin continues to answer.
In the street - café chairs abandoned
on terraces; market stalls emptied
of their solid light,
though pavement still breathes
summer grapes and peaches.
Like the light of anything that grows
from this newly-turned earth,
every tip of me gathers under your touch,
wind wrapping my dress around our legs,
your shirt twisting to flowers in my fists.
("Flowers", from The Weight of Oranges/Miner's Pond (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997). p.83.)
Published works:
A list of awards:
- Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas, for The Weight of Oranges, 1986.
- Canadian Authors' Association Award, for Poetry, for Miner's Pond, 1991.
- Short-listed, Governor General's Award, for poetry, for Miner's Pond, 1991.
- National Magazine Award, for poetry, gold medal, 1991.
- Short-listed, Trillium Award, for Miner's Pond, 1991.
- Short-listed, the Giller Prize, for Fugitive Pieces, 1996.
- Canadian Booksellers Association Author of the Year Award, 1996.
- Trillium Prize, for Fugitive Pieces, 1996.
- Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, for Fugitive Pieces, 1996.
- The Beatrice and Martin Fischer Award, for Fugitive Pieces, 1996.
- Orange Prize, for Fugitive Pieces, 1996.
Sources:
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/michaels/bio.htm
http://www.ucalgary.ca/UofC/faculties/HUM/ENGL/canada/poet/a_michaels.htm
http://www.writersunion.ca/m/michaels.htm
http://www.wordsworth.com/www/present/michaels/
http://www.geocities.com/annemichaels
and thanks to Swap for an update