Poems: Miner's Pond, The Weight of Oranges, Skin Divers

by Anne Michaels

A collection of poems by Anne Michaels. The poems are meditations on how love changes in order to survive, how we move from "obsolete science" to new perceptions, and how, in her words, "the same loneliness that closes us/ Opens us again".

Genres: Poetry, Canada, Canadian Literature, 20th Century, Nonfiction

220 pages, Paperback

First published April 5, 1997

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

[Vehka Kurjenmiekka · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has been one of the best reading experiences of my life. Michaels just - uh, I can't really even describe it, but she just hits hard and cuts through everything and sometimes her poems are, well. Like this:


"There are nights in the forest of words
when I panic, every step into thicker darkness,
the only way out to write myself into a clearing,
which is silence.

Nights in the forest of words
when I'm afraid we won't hear each other
over clattering branches, over
both our voices calling.

In winter, in the hour
when the sun runs liquid then freezes,
caught in the mantilla of empty trees;
when my heart listens
through the cold stethoscope of fear,
your voice in my head reminds me
what the light teaches.

Slowly you translate fear into love,
the way the moon's blood is the sea."

//re-read on 11th of October, 2021: still the best book I've ever read.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read more than half of this before giving up, at least for the time being. When Michaels is good, as with a monologue like "Ice House," she is very good, a quieter, less direct counterpart to Richard Howard's fussier monologues. But too many of the poems seem to me to be simply psycho-dramas, a mix of image and direct statement exploring her emotional states. This wears on me very soon.

[Sonja · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anne Michaels’ poems are beautiful and stirring. This is a volume that includes two books: The Weight of Oranges (1986) and Miner’s Pond (1991) The book I read did not include the third book.
I love her lines: they are full but irregular.

Last night I looked out
to the grocer’s across your street,
baskets of flowers lining the sidewalk,
trembling in the dark wind.
The gasp of paper and leaves
made me eighteen again—
nothing about the feeling had changed,
the ambush of longing October calls out.
I’m living proof
we don’t stop wanting
what we can’t have.

From “Sublimation” Anne Michaels

I do love her poetry just as I love her prose.

[Molly Fleet · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

In Michiko Kakutani's words "[Michaels has] a gift for the sleight-of-hand metaphor and the glittering, symbolic image."

Standouts:

Islands that are outer. Not barren
but precise. Not a wildflower
wasted.
(...)
There is no song the sea
will not put in its mouth.

---

Attentive as your favourite poet,
Tsvetaeva - who listened with the roots of her hair.

---

The light changing Otto's face, changing
him.
Winter turning the walls blue.
Imagining him naked, even as he stood there,
naked.

---

The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.

---

November, season of half days,
slips under the door like an envelope.

[Desmond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Music

[Isa King · Rating 5 out of 5]

An omnibus of three separate collections written by Anne Michaels over the course of 15 years, this book of poems was an exceptional read! A lot of these poems remind me, stylistically, of Mary Oliver: the lyricism and imagery of the poems, which use nature as an avenue by which we can understand ourselves (and vice versa). Michaels writes a lot about love and its myriad of forms—platonic, romantic, parental, etc.—as it has shaped her life, and I loved getting to track the different registers of love through the evolution of these collections which were intended to speak to one another. For Michaels, love always seems to be punctuated by grief, tenderness outlined by the inevitability of loss and perhaps more precious for it—and also perhaps why winter has such prominence, more than other seasons, in her works. Skin Divers was probably my favorite collection out of the three.


Some favorites that made me feel insane:
- What the Light Reaches ["Prayer is the effort of wresting words/ not from silence,/ but from the noise of other words./ To penetrate heaven, we must reach/ what breaks in us."]
- Words for the Body ["You spoke of a kind of hunger/ that makes pleasure perfect./ Then you said how it was to be opened/ and tasted by a hall full of people."]
- The Weight of Oranges (the poem, not the whole collection though it was also very very good holistically) ["I hear your voice now—I know,/ everyone knows promises come from fear./ People don't live past each other,/ you're always here with me."]

[Darlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

So far, I've been very absorbed with her words.

Some verses I hardly know what she's talking about, but I get the sense that it's supposed to be very lyrical and such.

The poems I liked best are the short ones, the ones with imagery painted with unusual combination of adjectives and interesting mix of metaphors I have to read thrice before fully seeing the image she painted with her words. I like her. (She's...a quirky siren in my head, at least that's how I feel when I read her work. Don't worry if you can't relate, I'm odd.)

At times, I get the feeling that I've just been drenched with an intangible rain of words that my senses seem to be heightened just by reading. It's strange. It's addictive.

------------

My favourite was "Flowers". I even copied it in my notebook.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michaels combines geology and biology in twisting narrative poems brimming with feeling. Her poems have a weighty mineral feel; salt and iodine. She layers art and language, landscape and texture and substance and beauty...sensuality and substance come together with immense gravity.

[meg o'neill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Up there on the list of my favorite books of all time. I could devour the images and feelings invoked. Utterly conceptual and delicious.

[Eve · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We recognize death and love when we start calling them names"

[Monet Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of my favorite poems ever, revisited on a long drive. One of the particular best in my opinion: Words for the Body. The poem is introspective, sensitive, and physically familiar. "Fingers have a memory, to read the familiar braille of another’s skin. The body has a memory: the children we make, places we’ve hurt ourselves, sieves of our skeletons in the fat soil. No words mean as much as a life. Only the body pronounces perfectly the name of another." ... "Any discovery of form is a moment of memory, existing as the historical moment—alone, and existing in history—linear, in music, in the sentence. Each poem, each piece remembers our bodies, the way man and woman in their joining remember each other before they were separate. It’s over twenty-five years and every love poem says how your music and my words are the same: praising the common air, the motive, the memory. To praise memory is to praise the body."

Anne Michaels writes from a very pensive, sentimental point of view that resonates with me for the evocative homesickness, memory recollections, and painful/wistful sensations of both the material and immaterial that she somehow writes with the most singular visual devastation. There's such a strong core to her writing. The Weight of Oranges is one of my favorite poems ever written and is one that I share with anyone when I want to try and get them to start reading poetry. I particularly just love it for the way the poem ends, painting a clear picture that cuts straight into your heart: "I hear your voice now—I know, everyone knows promises come from fear. People don’t live past each other, you’re always here with me. Sometimes I pretend you’re in the other room until it rains… and then this is the letter I always write: The letter I write when they’re keeping me from home. I smell your supper steaming in the kitchen. There are paper bags on the table with their bottoms melted out by rain and the weight of oranges."

You can interpret these poems about either loss or love, and they both connect so strongly to the theme. The central idea: Love is many things but rarely is it convenient. It's gutting, overwhelming, and feverish, it stays in the body, it invents a new kind of language, it gives you a new form to inhabit. I adore how Michaels connects the mental sensations of love and memory and the madness they inspire to the body and to the scenery. Such as in Phantom Limbs: "So much of the city is our bodies. Places in us old light still slants through to. Places that no longer exist but are full of feeling, like phantom limbs. Even the city carries ruins in its heart. Longs to be touched in places only it remembers."

These poems are humanizing and gorgeous, and some of my favorite ones to read. Very beautiful without too much dramatic prose, just simple and straight but somehow maintaining the surreal that causes someone to write in the first place.

[Lex · Rating 5 out of 5]

The precision that Anne Michaels writes with coupled with the broad scope of her themes and topics (lots of nature and stars and the sky, which I always appreciate) is an awesome and very emotional mix. I love love loved the couple of poems where she wrote from the point of view of various historical figures. A lot of snippets and lines of each of her poems made me....real weird in a good way. Could not recommend more.

[Hypatia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Anne Michaels has a wonderful way with language, and as I was reading this, occasionally a line or two would really catch me. I also really loved that there was a poem about Kepler. At the same time though, poetry just doesn't really do it for me. I much prefer a big meaty story I can really get lost in.

[Paris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hands down my favourite book by any author in any genre. Certain sentences are so painfully beautiful I have to repeat them to myself over and over again or copy them out. I like to carry it around with me and read it outside in the sunshine or wind.

[Kate Tucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite contemporary poets. Decadence of memory in every line.

[Swan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a lovely beautiful book of poetry! I am very happy it was lent to me.

[Yuliya · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful book. beautiful writing. beautiful poems.

[Isla McKetta · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd read Skin Divers before, but the rest of this book was new to me and I fell in love, love, love. Definitely merits a re-read. And then a re-re-read.

[Jeanette (Ms. Feisty) · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are three books in one here, with about 7-8 years between each, so quality and topics vary greatly. On top of that, I think I'm out of practice in my "poetry appreciation" skills. I will say without reservation that I much prefer the beautiful writing in her novel, Fugitive Pieces. The imagery and meaning is much more accessible there than in her poetry.

With this book I found that I enjoyed small portions of many poems rather than whole poems. There were three that I did especially like in their entirety:

Anna (quite haunting)
Miner's Pond (a beautiful tribute to some of her family members)
Skin Divers (outstanding images of nature, especially the moon!)

[Chaneli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Completely in love with this collection which is comprised of three of Michaels collections which were all written as companions. She has an incredible understanding of language and descriptions of every small detail of humanity. every poem tells very specific stories that speaks to the human soul, experience, nature, loneliness, love, companionship, life, etc.

I will love this collection forever and i'm excited to her novels in the future.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so filled with absolutely amazing imagery. It takes you places emotionally, spiritually and you aren't even aware that you have been there until you stop reading. Rich and colorful in her descriptions it is a very personal experience reading this collection of poetry. For all the poetry readers out there and those who never have I highly recommend it.

[Stephen Batty · Rating 4 out of 5]

...i love this lady. She is as deep as life itself. Of course i am over exuberant, five stars, how else would one live? So far i've seen the artistic expression of her engagement with the earthly survival machine. Now i'm wondering what a graph of her emotional responses would look like, what her hearbeat rate has been along the journey?

[Anna Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book, and I love Anne Michaels. She's a little difficult to write a biography about though.
My ridiculous thesis for my english class is that she uses the reoccurring image of a fridge to symbolize Judaism during the holocaust.

[Tasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful book. "Flowers," "Phantom Limbs," "Turning Twenty-three," not to mention "The Weight of Oranges." One of my favorite lines?
"We grow old like rivers, get shrunk and doubled over
until we can't find the mouth of anything." (from "The Weight of Oranges")

[j · Rating 5 out of 5]

it's very good but the weight of oranges is worth the price of admission alone. go read it on tumblr. print it out and put it on the fridge and read it when you wait for the microwave. it's nice is all.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of poems touched my heart in so many ways.

[Meredith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only the Weight of Oranges - different edition.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I. Love. Anne. Michaels.

[Sue · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to love this book but couldn't. Her poems are told in historic voices of famous artists, authors, poets, scientists etc. Interesting stories & information, but hard to enjoy as poetry.

[Jonathan Brubeck · Rating 5 out of 5]

This gets read by me at least several times a year. Michaels comes up with metaphors that make me smile every time.