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Skin Divers
Skin Divers is award-winning writer Anne Michaels’ dazzling third book of poems. These poems develop the concern with love, transience, and memory evident in her earlier work, and at the same time signal a definitive turning point towards a new thematic landscape.
Michaels is a writer whose thoughts take shape in sensuous images, verbal music, and sinuous lines. Her short lyrics, like the longer monologues based on the lives of historical figures, explore an inner world fluid with feeling and memory. They reveal complex climates of emotion and sentiment, yet remain unsparing and unsentimental. As in the best poetry of our time, the luminous calm at the heart of her vision also registers the pressure of the darkness in our lives that has been momentarily withstood.
These powerful poems, tense with desire and “divided longings,” remind us that Anne Michaels is among the most original poets of her generation.
From the Hardcover edition.
Michaels is a writer whose thoughts take shape in sensuous images, verbal music, and sinuous lines. Her short lyrics, like the longer monologues based on the lives of historical figures, explore an inner world fluid with feeling and memory. They reveal complex climates of emotion and sentiment, yet remain unsparing and unsentimental. As in the best poetry of our time, the luminous calm at the heart of her vision also registers the pressure of the darkness in our lives that has been momentarily withstood.
These powerful poems, tense with desire and “divided longings,” remind us that Anne Michaels is among the most original poets of her generation.
From the Hardcover edition.
80 pages, Paperback
First published September 23, 1999
1 person is currently reading
597 people want to read
About the author
Anne Michaels
24 books589 followersAnne 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
November 14, 2017
Anne Michaels’ poems confirm what her novels imply – that she is a diehard romantic. For her everything comes down to love. All her best lines are about love. Her characters find identity in love. I’m no authority on poetry so I’ll just say I enjoyed most of these poems a lot.
December 19, 2016
Anne Michaels' Skin Divers is an absolutely phenomenal poetry collection, particularly so after I was a little disappointed by her novel Fugitive Pieces. Most of the stanzas here are achingly beautiful, and her writing is so intelligent and thought-provoking. Michaels' creation of imagery too is delightful and original: 'Starlight / soaks our shoes', and 'Frozen sparklers of Queen Anne's lace', for instance. I shall leave you with a few of my absolute favourite fragments from the collection.
'Tonight the moon traipses in bare feet,
silk stockings left behind
like pieces of river.'
(From 'Skin Divers')
'We opened the door to
the aurora borealis, to icebergs, to distant
mountains lining the shelves.'
(From 'The Second Search')
'I love you as if you'll return
after years of absence.
As if we'd invented
moonlight.'
(From 'Ice House')
'Colette said, when one we love dies
there's no reason to stop
writing them letters.'
(From 'The Hooded Hawk')
'There is no song the sea
will not put in its mouth.'
(From 'Fontanelles')
'All love is time travel.'
(From 'Fontanelles')
'Tonight the moon traipses in bare feet,
silk stockings left behind
like pieces of river.'
(From 'Skin Divers')
'We opened the door to
the aurora borealis, to icebergs, to distant
mountains lining the shelves.'
(From 'The Second Search')
'I love you as if you'll return
after years of absence.
As if we'd invented
moonlight.'
(From 'Ice House')
'Colette said, when one we love dies
there's no reason to stop
writing them letters.'
(From 'The Hooded Hawk')
'There is no song the sea
will not put in its mouth.'
(From 'Fontanelles')
'All love is time travel.'
(From 'Fontanelles')
April 10, 2015
Now we’re like planets, holding to each other
from a great distance.
[...] Now we’re hundreds of miles apart,
our short arms keep us lonely,
no one hears what’s in my head.
[...] It’s March, even the birds
don’t know what to do with themselves.
[...]
I want you to promise
we’ll see each other again,
you’ll send a letter.
Promise we’ll be lost together
in our forest, pale birches of our legs.
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…
from a great distance.
[...] Now we’re hundreds of miles apart,
our short arms keep us lonely,
no one hears what’s in my head.
[...] It’s March, even the birds
don’t know what to do with themselves.
[...]
I want you to promise
we’ll see each other again,
you’ll send a letter.
Promise we’ll be lost together
in our forest, pale birches of our legs.
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…
March 19, 2013
No writer touches my heart and makes my cells swing like Anne Michaels. As always she captures the essence of being human, being material and being (in) the world with tenderness, boundless beauty, powerful images, musicality and precision. The latter I find at times almost too much though. With words like sphagnum, keloids, cilia appearing on the same page I'm wondering whether she's become a tad too contrived. I wonder if the quest for precision impedes on the celebration of love, encapsulates without really opening up and letting the reader in. Still this 68 page collection is no big feat and Anne Michaels deserves a readership that can take her challenge and takes their time to take her in, as in 'In the night garden, light is a swallowed cry'.
October 15, 2020
This. Book. Is. Brilliant. (Imagine me banging a table here.)
I've never read poetry quite like this: intervowen stories within stories within stories, history mixed with raw emotion, rambling sentences yet every word is in the exactly right place.
The poem about Marie Curie - "The Second Search" - is so good I've read it eight times within 24 hours. And there are a few others, almost as good, and if not quite as good, still good enough to make me cry.
"I think of silver skin,
invisible in the current,
yet separating cold bright blood
from the colourless river. Invisible
as oxygen sealing water and ice,
so the line between river and sky
won’t break, hydrogen aligning itself
in one direction, under skaters’ blades.
Moving faster with each slow stride.
Nothing warms like motion,
speed in our thighs.
I can only find you
by looking deeper, that’s how love
leads us into the world.
My hands burn all the time."
I've never read poetry quite like this: intervowen stories within stories within stories, history mixed with raw emotion, rambling sentences yet every word is in the exactly right place.
The poem about Marie Curie - "The Second Search" - is so good I've read it eight times within 24 hours. And there are a few others, almost as good, and if not quite as good, still good enough to make me cry.
"I think of silver skin,
invisible in the current,
yet separating cold bright blood
from the colourless river. Invisible
as oxygen sealing water and ice,
so the line between river and sky
won’t break, hydrogen aligning itself
in one direction, under skaters’ blades.
Moving faster with each slow stride.
Nothing warms like motion,
speed in our thighs.
I can only find you
by looking deeper, that’s how love
leads us into the world.
My hands burn all the time."
September 28, 2016
Exceptionally strong and well crafted poems of longing and belonging
January 28, 2020
It’s a lovely collection and there are some good poems here. I think, I’m not quite a fan of epic-length pieces that somehow lead me astray (“Fontanelles” definitely did). The shorter pieces were really good and wrapped up nicely.
Everything else just made me a little bit lost. Or maybe because some of the vocabulary was uh, unfamiliar... LMAO and too “American”(????)
Everything else just made me a little bit lost. Or maybe because some of the vocabulary was uh, unfamiliar... LMAO and too “American”(????)
August 4, 2022
“Unbroken broken sea.”
“How similar the leap of faith and the leap of fear.”
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
“How similar the leap of faith and the leap of fear.”
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
August 26, 2014
Skin Divers A perfect example of a poetry book that was published more than 10 years ago yet has that timeless quality to it, making it relate-able to people who follow in the coming years. There's a lot of beautiful imagery in this collection and although there aren't as many poems, many of them are rather long, so the magic lasts double the time. It was easy to be drawn into the writing and the atmosphere Michaels created, and each poem evoked emotions from the reader. All the poems had a light, effortless quality to them that draw you in and keep your interest. A rather short, but very powerful collection.
January 19, 2022
Three weeks longing, water burning
stone. Three weeks leopard blood
pacing under the loud insomnia of stars.
Three weeks voltaic. Weeks of winter
afternoons, darkness half descended.
Howling at distance, ocean
pulling between us, bending time.
Three weeks finding you in me in new places,
luminescent as a tetra in depths,
its neon trail.
Three weeks shipwrecked on this mad island;
twisting aurora of perfumes. Every boundary of body
electrified, every thought hunted down
by memory of touch. Three weeks of open eyes
when you call, your first question,
Did I wake you . . .
* * *
There is no city that does not dream
from its foundation. The lost lake
crumbling in the hands of brickmasters,
the floor of the ravine were light lies broken
with the memory of rivers. All the winters
stores in that geologic
garden. Dinosaurs sleep in the subway
at Bloor and Shaw, a bed of bones
under the rumbling track. The storm
that lit the city with the voltage
of spring, when we were eighteen
on the clean earth. The ferry ride in the rain,
wind wet with wedding music and everything that
sings in the carbon of stone and bone
like a page of love, wind-lost from a hand, unread.
* * *
The Passionate World
is round. For days we sail, for months,
and still the way is new; strange stars.
Drawn to you, taut over time,
ropes connect this floating floor
to the wind, fraying into sound.
To arrive is to sleep
where we stop moving.
Past the shoal of clothes
to that shore, heaped with debris
of words. A hem of salt,
white lace, on sea-heavy legs.
Love longs for land. All night
we dream the jungle's sleepy electricity;
gnashing chords of insects swim in our ears
and we go under, into green. All night
love draws in heavy drape of scent against the sea
and we wake with the allure of earth in our lungs,
hungry for bread and oranges.
Salamanders dart from your step's shadow, disappear
among wild coffee, flashy cacti, thorny succulents and
flowers like bowls to save the rain.
We are sailors who wake when the moon intrudes
the smoky tavern of dreams, wake to find a name on an arm
or our bodies bruised by sun or the pressure of a hand,
wake with the map of night on our skin,
traced like moss-stained stone.
Lost, past the last familiar outpost,
flat on deck, milky light cool on our damp hair,
we look up past the ship's angles to stars austere
as a woodcut, and pray we never reach
the lights of that invisible city, where,
landlocked, they have given up on our return.
But some nights, woken by wind,
looking up at different starts,
they are reminded of us, the faint taste of
salt on their lips.
* * *
Wherever we cry,
it's far from home.
*
At Sandwich, our son pointed
persistently to sea.
I followed his infant gaze,
expecting a bird or a boat
but there was nothing.
How unnerving,
as if he could see you
on the horizon,
knew where you were
exactly:
at the edge of the world.
*
You unloaded the ship at Lyttleton
and repacked her:
"thirty-five dogs
five tons of dog food
fifteen ponies
thirty-two tons of pony fodder
three motor-sledges
four hundred and sixty tons of coal
collapsible huts
an acetylene plant
thirty-five thousand cigars
one guinea pig
one fantail pigeon
three rabbits
one cat with its own hammock, blanket and pillow
one hundred and sixty-two carcasses of mutton and
an ice house"
*
Men returned from war
without faces, with noses lost
discretely as antique statues,
accurately as if eaten
by frostbite.
In clay I shaped their
flesh, sometimes
retrieving a likeness
from photographs.
Then the surgeons copies
nose, ear, jaw
with molten wax and metal plates
and horsehair stitches;
with borrowed cartilage,
from the soldiers' own ribs,
leftovers stored under the skin
of the abdomen. I held the men down
until the morphia
slid into them.
I was only sick
afterwards.
Working the clay, I remembered
mornings in Rodin's studio
his drawerfuls of tiny hands and feet,
like a mechanic's tool box.
I imagined my mother in her blindness
before she died, touching my face,
as if still she could
build me with her body.
At night, in the studio
I took your face in my hands and your fine
arms and long legs, your small waist,
and loved you into stone.
The men returned from France
to Ellerman's Hospital.
Their courage
was beautiful.
I understood the work at once:
To use scar tissue to advantage.
To construct through art,
one's face to the world.
Sculpt what's missing.
*
You reached furthest south,
then you went further.
In neither of those forsaken places
did you forsaken us.
*
At Lyttleton the hills unrolled,
a Japanese scroll painting;
we opened the landscape with our bare feet.
So much learned by observation.
We took in brainfuls of New Zealand air
on the blue climb over the falls.
Our last night together we slept
not in the big house but
in the Kinseys' garden.
Belonging only to each other.
Guests of the earth.
*
Mid-sea, a month out of range
of the wireless;
on my way to you. Floating
between landfalls,
between one hemisphere and another.
Between the words
"wife" and "widow".
*
Newspapers, politicians
scavenged your journals.
But your words
never lost their way.
*
We mourn in a place no one knows;
it's right that our grief be unseen.
I love you as if you'll return
after years of absence.
As if we'd invented
moonlight.
*
Still I dream
of your arrival.
stone. Three weeks leopard blood
pacing under the loud insomnia of stars.
Three weeks voltaic. Weeks of winter
afternoons, darkness half descended.
Howling at distance, ocean
pulling between us, bending time.
Three weeks finding you in me in new places,
luminescent as a tetra in depths,
its neon trail.
Three weeks shipwrecked on this mad island;
twisting aurora of perfumes. Every boundary of body
electrified, every thought hunted down
by memory of touch. Three weeks of open eyes
when you call, your first question,
Did I wake you . . .
- Three Weeks, pg. 3
* * *
There is no city that does not dream
from its foundation. The lost lake
crumbling in the hands of brickmasters,
the floor of the ravine were light lies broken
with the memory of rivers. All the winters
stores in that geologic
garden. Dinosaurs sleep in the subway
at Bloor and Shaw, a bed of bones
under the rumbling track. The storm
that lit the city with the voltage
of spring, when we were eighteen
on the clean earth. The ferry ride in the rain,
wind wet with wedding music and everything that
sings in the carbon of stone and bone
like a page of love, wind-lost from a hand, unread.
- There Is No City That Does Not Dream, pg. 16
* * *
The Passionate World
is round. For days we sail, for months,
and still the way is new; strange stars.
Drawn to you, taut over time,
ropes connect this floating floor
to the wind, fraying into sound.
To arrive is to sleep
where we stop moving.
Past the shoal of clothes
to that shore, heaped with debris
of words. A hem of salt,
white lace, on sea-heavy legs.
Love longs for land. All night
we dream the jungle's sleepy electricity;
gnashing chords of insects swim in our ears
and we go under, into green. All night
love draws in heavy drape of scent against the sea
and we wake with the allure of earth in our lungs,
hungry for bread and oranges.
Salamanders dart from your step's shadow, disappear
among wild coffee, flashy cacti, thorny succulents and
flowers like bowls to save the rain.
We are sailors who wake when the moon intrudes
the smoky tavern of dreams, wake to find a name on an arm
or our bodies bruised by sun or the pressure of a hand,
wake with the map of night on our skin,
traced like moss-stained stone.
Lost, past the last familiar outpost,
flat on deck, milky light cool on our damp hair,
we look up past the ship's angles to stars austere
as a woodcut, and pray we never reach
the lights of that invisible city, where,
landlocked, they have given up on our return.
But some nights, woken by wind,
looking up at different starts,
they are reminded of us, the faint taste of
salt on their lips.
- The Passionate World, pg. 26-27
* * *
Wherever we cry,
it's far from home.
*
At Sandwich, our son pointed
persistently to sea.
I followed his infant gaze,
expecting a bird or a boat
but there was nothing.
How unnerving,
as if he could see you
on the horizon,
knew where you were
exactly:
at the edge of the world.
*
You unloaded the ship at Lyttleton
and repacked her:
"thirty-five dogs
five tons of dog food
fifteen ponies
thirty-two tons of pony fodder
three motor-sledges
four hundred and sixty tons of coal
collapsible huts
an acetylene plant
thirty-five thousand cigars
one guinea pig
one fantail pigeon
three rabbits
one cat with its own hammock, blanket and pillow
one hundred and sixty-two carcasses of mutton and
an ice house"
*
Men returned from war
without faces, with noses lost
discretely as antique statues,
accurately as if eaten
by frostbite.
In clay I shaped their
flesh, sometimes
retrieving a likeness
from photographs.
Then the surgeons copies
nose, ear, jaw
with molten wax and metal plates
and horsehair stitches;
with borrowed cartilage,
from the soldiers' own ribs,
leftovers stored under the skin
of the abdomen. I held the men down
until the morphia
slid into them.
I was only sick
afterwards.
Working the clay, I remembered
mornings in Rodin's studio
his drawerfuls of tiny hands and feet,
like a mechanic's tool box.
I imagined my mother in her blindness
before she died, touching my face,
as if still she could
build me with her body.
At night, in the studio
I took your face in my hands and your fine
arms and long legs, your small waist,
and loved you into stone.
The men returned from France
to Ellerman's Hospital.
Their courage
was beautiful.
I understood the work at once:
To use scar tissue to advantage.
To construct through art,
one's face to the world.
Sculpt what's missing.
*
You reached furthest south,
then you went further.
In neither of those forsaken places
did you forsaken us.
*
At Lyttleton the hills unrolled,
a Japanese scroll painting;
we opened the landscape with our bare feet.
So much learned by observation.
We took in brainfuls of New Zealand air
on the blue climb over the falls.
Our last night together we slept
not in the big house but
in the Kinseys' garden.
Belonging only to each other.
Guests of the earth.
*
Mid-sea, a month out of range
of the wireless;
on my way to you. Floating
between landfalls,
between one hemisphere and another.
Between the words
"wife" and "widow".
*
Newspapers, politicians
scavenged your journals.
But your words
never lost their way.
*
We mourn in a place no one knows;
it's right that our grief be unseen.
I love you as if you'll return
after years of absence.
As if we'd invented
moonlight.
*
Still I dream
of your arrival.
- Ice House, pg. 37-42
October 2, 2016
This is a lovely book with plenty of gorgeous imagery, and Michaels did a lot of research first, which I always love. However, I felt that despite the concrete images, she used too many abstractions in the poems, and the significance often got buried, as did things like to whom the "you" referred to. It also took me out of the poems that she would situate them in such imagistic scenarios and then go into a stanza or more that told rather than showed.
May 13, 2012
The last book of published poems by Michaels that I have yet not read. It's a bit bittersweet, I don't want it to end and so i read about one poem from it a month.
August 2, 2018
Excerpts from Last Night's Moon
March aspens, mist
forest. Green rain pins down
the sea, early evening
cyanotype. Silver saltlines, weedy
toques of low tide, pillow lava's
black spill indelible
in the sand. Unbroken
broken sea.
*
Rain sharpens marsh-hair
birth-green of the spring firs.
In the bog where the dead never disappear,
where river birch drown, the surface
strewn with reflection. This is the acid-soaked
moss that eats bones, keeps flesh;
the fermented ground where time stops and
doesn't; dissolves the skull, preserves
the brain, wrinkled pearl in black mud
*
All the history in the bone-embedded hills
of your body. Everything your mouth
remembers. Your hands manipulate
in the darkness, silver bromide
of desire darkening skin with light.
*
Disoriented at great depths,
confused by the noise of shipping routes,
whales hover, small eyes squinting as they consult
the magnetic map of the ocean floor. They strain,
a thousand miles through cold channels;
clicking thrums of distant loneliness
bounce off seamounts and abyssal plains. They look up
from perpetual dusk to rods of sunlight,
a solar forest at the surface.
Transfixed in the dark summer
kitchen; feet bare on humid
linoleum, cilia listening. Feral
as the infrared aura of the snake's prey, the bees'
pointillism, the infrasonic
hum of the desert heard by birds.
The nighthawk spans the ceiling;
swoops. Hot kitchen air
vibrates. I look up
to the pattern of stars under its wings.
December 29, 2025
“Night swimmers, skin divers” is one of the lines in the poem that gives this anthology its title. Michaels explores the body’s power as a vessel of memory and the past; experiences and losses are quite literally written on our skin and bones. Like the moon, which “touches places just by looking”, intimacy begins with noticing; emotion becomes a physical force, shaping our inner landscape over time.
"We are the ghost-written pages of the place we have been."
Several poems also confront how the “ghosts” of history; those of the Great Wars and the Holocaust, inhabit the present, reminding us of our duty to remember. Ice, water, and minerals recur as imagery, suggesting that the Earth itself remembers even when humans forget.
Ultimately, this is a book about surrender: surrendering to time’s passage, to the weight of history, and to the vulnerability of being “skin to skin” with another person.
It reads as if submerged in deep water: heavy, luminous, and clear.
"We are the ghost-written pages of the place we have been."
Several poems also confront how the “ghosts” of history; those of the Great Wars and the Holocaust, inhabit the present, reminding us of our duty to remember. Ice, water, and minerals recur as imagery, suggesting that the Earth itself remembers even when humans forget.
Ultimately, this is a book about surrender: surrendering to time’s passage, to the weight of history, and to the vulnerability of being “skin to skin” with another person.
It reads as if submerged in deep water: heavy, luminous, and clear.
October 27, 2021
This book is full of beautiful writing but almost too much of it to the extent that without context it looses meaning. Maybe if I spent a long time re-reading and analysing it I would appreciate the complex meaning that Ann Michael's placed behind those images but, and this might just be personal taste, I like poems that cut you sharp on the first read, then if you wish you can re-read, anylse and find even more meaning.
Their was one poem however that really stood out to me, that struck the cord perfectly between beautiful lanuage and meaning: The Second Search, wich tells the story of Marie Curie and Perre Currie's relationship. This is a fascinating read!
Their was one poem however that really stood out to me, that struck the cord perfectly between beautiful lanuage and meaning: The Second Search, wich tells the story of Marie Curie and Perre Currie's relationship. This is a fascinating read!
February 21, 2022
4+ Stars rounded up. “There is no song the sea will not put into its mouth.” Michaels is a poet I discovered after scouring through over 20 books of poetry grabbed at random from the Toronto Public Library looking for something decent. Michaels was the only book of the batch I grabbed which I was pulled to enough to read in its entirety. While not everything landed for me (there were quite a few list breaks and so forth that my eyes glazed over) the sheer romance of her evocative languages makes this a win for me. Michaels does a great job of telling the stories of the love of others in a way that really works. This is a short collection definitely worth your time if you come across it.
January 30, 2024
This collection took me a long, long time to make my way through, but the time taken made it all the better, I think. Poems I would have skimmed past in 2018 shone through with immediate clarity when I read them this year. A lot of time has passed, and my priorities as a reader have changed drastically. It was a good book to hold my breath through.
August 12, 2021
"If love wants you; if you've been melted
down into stars, you will love
with lungs and gills; with warm blood
and cold."
Last Night's Moon
A very beautiful experience to read this work on love and all its variations. I'm sure I will return to it often.
down into stars, you will love
with lungs and gills; with warm blood
and cold."
Last Night's Moon
A very beautiful experience to read this work on love and all its variations. I'm sure I will return to it often.
October 2, 2017
4.5/5 stars. Really quite something!!
December 28, 2017
This is a sweet and sentimental book with some really beautiful imagery. However, the style is not something that I enjoy.
March 7, 2021
Poems addressing love in its many aspects. Maybe I a romantic and sentimentalist but I enjoyed this collection a lot.
November 9, 2025
pretty good, probably gonna check out more from anne michaels
September 21, 2013
There are a few immaculate books whose language is so rich that I can only read a few pages at a time before putting them aside to absorb them. They are not inaccessible books, usually the words themselves are very simple, but it's the combination of those words and the unexpected imagery and fresh perspective that blow my writing mind. This is one of those books.
I've wanted to read Michaels' poetry for so long and I loved seeing echoes and starts of Fugitive Pieces and The Winter Vault here. But the fact that those links were not direct ones fascinated me even more. Instead Michaels explores other shores of the same islands.
I am still boggled by the fact that you can sense from the words on the page when the writing is true and personal and there's a divide between the three poems in Part II where Michaels delves even deeper into that personal realm to where I felt like I was touching a part of her soul.
This writing is a gift and I will read it over and over again.
I've wanted to read Michaels' poetry for so long and I loved seeing echoes and starts of Fugitive Pieces and The Winter Vault here. But the fact that those links were not direct ones fascinated me even more. Instead Michaels explores other shores of the same islands.
I am still boggled by the fact that you can sense from the words on the page when the writing is true and personal and there's a divide between the three poems in Part II where Michaels delves even deeper into that personal realm to where I felt like I was touching a part of her soul.
This writing is a gift and I will read it over and over again.
July 4, 2010
Skin Divers is Anne Michaels's third volume of poetry. I read it all in one sitting. It's a slim volume, as they say—only 68 pages including the acknowledgments—so this was not a great feat. But... I always feel a little guilty reading a book so fast when I know how long it probably took to write it. I'll try to make up for speed with re-readings.
The most important thing for me about poetry is that it sound right. It should have rhythm. It should flow. Michaels's poetry sounds right. It's... deceptively simple. Some lines you might think: I (or anyone) could have written that. And then you read it again and think: wow, that's amazing. From "Skin Divers": "Like the moon, I want to touch places / just by looking. To tell / new things at three in the morning, when we're / awake with rain or any sadness, or slendering through / reeds of sleep, surfacing to skin."
The most important thing for me about poetry is that it sound right. It should have rhythm. It should flow. Michaels's poetry sounds right. It's... deceptively simple. Some lines you might think: I (or anyone) could have written that. And then you read it again and think: wow, that's amazing. From "Skin Divers": "Like the moon, I want to touch places / just by looking. To tell / new things at three in the morning, when we're / awake with rain or any sadness, or slendering through / reeds of sleep, surfacing to skin."
December 14, 2016
The greatest poetry is poetry that literally slows you down. The richness of these words requires it. Each stanza like carefully gathered stones, each unique and full of hidden detail. But why try and describe poetry with poetry? All I can say is for some of us Anne Michaels is why we read poetry. I met her a few years ago and was doubly enriched by hearing her read. A great artist.
January 26, 2008
An exquisite and meditative collection of poetry from a writer who never wastes her words.
August 29, 2014
The skin is the only way to get to know each other. To dive and swim and keep breathing, paradoxically, when it seems we can't breath anymore.
January 9, 2011
amazing and lovely
March 11, 2012
Some of the most beautiful poetry I've read. Her words flow off the page and paint beautiful images.
May 6, 2014
I like her metaphors and images, as well as the sadness she makes you feel.
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