Infinite Gradation

by Anne Michaels

Infinite Gradation is an astonishing meditation on the mystery at the heart of our mortality.

In lines as precise and profound as any Michaels has written, Infinite Gradation movingly explores the nature of responsibility in extremis and the forms it takes—it is about hope in art, what art makes of death, and bears witness to the love and lives of visual artists and writers who have made work at the limits of experience.

Infinite Gradation finds its way to a most powerful solace.

(Michaels embraces mortality through three great artists, recently dead, who were her the sculptor Eva Hesse, the painter Jack Chambers, and Claire Wilks, print maker and sculptor.)

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Essays, Spirituality, Canada

96 pages, Paperback

First published October 9, 2017

About the author

Anne Michaels (born 15 April 1958) is a Canadian poet and novelist whose work has been translated and published in over 45 countries. Her books have garnered dozens of international awards including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. She is the recipient of honorary degrees, the Guggenheim Fellowship and many other honours. She has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice shortlisted for the Giller Prize and twice long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. Michaels won a 2019 Vine Award for Infinite Gradation, her first volume of non-fiction. Michaels was the poet laureate of Toronto, Ontario, Canada from 2016 to 2019, and she is perhaps best known for her novel Fugitive Pieces, which was adapted for the screen in 2007.

Reviews

[Nell Beaudry McLachlan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anne Michaels offers, once again, a touching, lucid foray into subject matter that digs deep to find the reader and catch her by the heart. Infinite Gradation, a collection of poems, poem-as-essays, and blank space, works to expose the meat of writing, reading, creating, the conversation that happens between a page and its writer and a page and its reader and the way the page mediates between them. And, as always, it was generous and tender, as Michaels reveals intimacy in luminous lines, all while navigating the very concept of distance--much in the way a series of waves bring themselves nearer and pull themselves away, with an innate sense of rhythm and grace that leaves the reader (or wave-watcher) eager for the next moment of closeness rather than distressed over the distancing.

[Vehka Kurjenmiekka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anne Michaels seems to be the kind of poet you want to read everything from at once. I discovered her work two days ago and now I've read two and half collections, and I'm yearning to read more. (And I'll do so, as soon as I've finished this small review.)

In this collection the poems and small essays follow each other in harmony. Both deal with telling true stories, writing poetry, making the right choices and finding out how to live with the fact we are all mortal.

And this collection handles all of those themes really, really well. I'd like to quote so many lines from this book, but let's go with this:

"We have an instinctive belief in the power of violence – we don’t need to be repeatedly reminded of that power. But, that a single act of compassion, or simply the refusal to do harm, also has profound power – this is something we seem to need to be reminded of, again and again.

An act of violence demands a response.
An act of goodness is its own response."

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5) The structure of this collection was really poignant - the cycle between short poems on the death of a loved one, reflections on the importance of poetry/fiction, and longer narratives about artists who created art near their deaths was very moving. The writing itself was quite nice. I’m not sure if this book will stay with me, but it was a thoughtful way to spend a couple of hours.

[Laura/Raadelma · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5. stars. The essay part felt a little bit distant to me, which is why I didn't give this four stars, but I loved everything else.

[Leif · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh.

"We write and we read in order to hold another human being close." With that in mind, three things:

i) a mediation about poetry. Always and forever, Anne Michaels is thinking about poetry, "the lonely, radical, precious, expression of a single life." The things she has written about poetry have been collected here, and they are moving and true.

ii) fractured glimpses of lives. Poems bent and elongated with the weight of suffering, sprung with the force of love.

iii) a story about a woman's encounters with loss. Through that loss, the implied background: an immense passion for life, the luckiness to have such great, noble, and intelligent friends, and the ability to recognize and seize those moments, those friends, that life.

To end, a prayer:

Fiction sets a broken bone in the hope that it will mend straight. It is a plea, a prayer, and because language itself is hope -- the automatic hope of a voice calling out even in despair even involuntarily -- fiction seeks the error in a complex mechanism, seeks to reset the human flaw. Fiction recreates what never happened. By recreating that potential, it addresses both past and future. It does not seek forgiveness, it seeks to understand. It does not dare to hope, yet it is hope distilled. It is both solute and solvent, resignation and conspiracy. Buried within the history of what did not happen is the possibility of redemption at the core of failure. That redemption does not lie in words or in the writer, but in the reader.

I have been reading Michaels for years. There are surprises here and so too her illuminating, steadfast beacon of consistency. She remains a light in darkness.

[Terry Pitts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael’s book about writing, art, memory, love, and loss is infused with death and grief on nearly every page. And yet, Infinite Gradation is a surprisingly celebratory and compassionate book. Death motivates Michaels to try to spin a fragile web of words that might help her (and us) understand the relationship between art and death. And the answer lies – as always – hidden, unspeakable, unseeable, but somehow known or felt in that “infinite gradation.” The art that Michaels writes about is not so much a product but a state of being, a way of “belonging,” an ability to participate in life using “the most conscious act of looking.”

Michaels discusses at some length the very nature of writing itself, which she sees as a “privilege” that is nevertheless “philosophically, morally, emotionally, perilous.” "Morality is a muscle and must be exercised if we are to respond, to do the right thing instinctively—to overcome our hopelessness, our indifference, our shock. Literature is one place to exercise that muscle." This is a quiet, but insistent book, packed with nuggets of great beauty and insight.

A longer review can be found on my blog

[Andrea McDowell · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is the point of creating in the face of death?

In this short book that hovers over the boundaries of poetry and prose, Michaels attempts an answer. It is characteristically beautiful and generous, and this book has become one of my all-time favourites.

A few lines:

"Fiction sets a broken bone in the hope that it will mend straight. It is a plea, a prayer, and because language itself is hope -- the autonomic hope of a voice calling out even in despair, even involuntarily -- fiction seeks the error in a complex mechanism, seeks to reset the human flaw."

One thing I've been thinking about in the last few years, as I continue to work in climate change even though the chances of an even moderately happy ending decline by the day, is "there may not be hope, but there's still a point"--a point to trying and working and continuing to try and work even knowing that the outcome may still be terrible. This book helps me to tease out some of the point: knowing that I acted in accordance with my own values, yes, that's one; but also that we can never know the outcome of the work we do, and if we need to know that we'll be heard in a way we ourselves can see and measure, we may never begin. So you do the work anyway, hoping that it will achieve good beyond what you're aware of.

[ingydar · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Four months before you died, during

your last summer, you looked at the

sea. For weeks, the most conscious act

of looking. If you could take in that

unending movement, that light, the

moment water is displaced by water.

You knew there was an answer there.

In that infinite gradation.”

[Andrea Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing and profound book that speaks to the mysteries of life and how death is one of the passages of our journey. Anne Michaels inspires and informs my soul. Perception and purpose are made clear.

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

shook per usual. i will walk to toronto if i have to

[Melody C · Rating 3 out of 5]

Could have done without the essays, but the beginning few poems were very nice

[Νίκη · Rating 5 out of 5]

When someone asks me why I love literature so much I won't say anything, I will just give them this book.

[mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

"That the extreme of cruelty and compassion, of horror and empathy, exist side-by-side on this earth has become such a commonplace, perhaps the concept of paradox is no longer useful."

[Christie Abraham · Rating 5 out of 5]

November dusk. We belong where love finds us.

The one book of poems I would gift anyone.

[myteens · Rating 4 out of 5]

All is a doubling. A belonging. Space

and time, vision and object, body and

body, water and light. In your absence

is your presence.

[Nora Rubinstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

When they march me off without the things that I have gathered around me, this book will go with me to hold me in place.

Thank you Anne. And Michael.