Fugitive Pieces

May 25, 1998
Three collections of poems by novelist Michaels (Fugitive Pieces) have been brought together for their first U.S. publication: The Weight of Oranges, Miner's Pond and Skin Divers. As the sensuousness of these titles suggests, Michaels goes for a portentous lyric well-stocked with physical details, action verbs, simile and metaphor--"we are black smudges on the frozen river"; "We were sent for a reason,/ like curtains blown in from an open window/ to knock over a cup." When she writes from a perspective one assumes to be her own ("Miner's Pond"; "Words for the Body"), Michaels's lush and elliptical narratives are winning. Increasingly, her poems take historical figures and their lovers as subjects and speakers, echoing her work in historical fiction, and including Alfred Doblin, Johannes Kepler, Karen Blixen, Amedeo Modigliani, Anna Akhmatova and Marie Curie. These poems don't always carry the freight of their subjects' fame lightly, though, and by the book's second half the metaphors begin to misfire as bad homages, as in the Akhmatovesque "Birds plunge their cries like needles/ into the thick arm of afternoon." The worst merely recap generic moments of pathos in a tone more borrowed from biography than reanimated by sympathy. Fans of fellow Canadian and Knopf novelist-poet Michael Ondaatje may find much to admire here though, and the better poems should find a significant audience.

Marinker's voice is gentle, his delivery precise and sensuous. He makes you aware of the weight of each word, aware that the author--a Canadian poet--has made deliberate selections. Her first novel is very much about language and about memory, its ability to sear, to heal, but most of all, to transform. The story concerns a Polish-Jewish child, Jakob Beer, who witnesses the murder of his family at the hands of the Nazis, and his rescue by Athos, a Greek geologist, who secrets the boy to his Greek island. Under Athos's infinitely humane tutelage, Jakob will learn the redemptive power of love. Fugitive Pieces is a difficult, layered novel, which doesn't follow a strict narrative path. That's why Marinker's reading, passionate but measured, is so effective, forever keeping the listener in the moment. M.O. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine