Correspondences

January 1, 2014

"In the beginning/ was a conversation," writes Canadian novelist and poet Michaels (Fugitive Pieces), joined by artist Eisenstein to create an accordion-style book of word and image. Like the instrument that creates music from wind passing through its folded and unfolded bellows, these poems join words in a connected breathing that becomes "a communication/ with ghosts." Michaels calls on 20th-century thinkers, artists, and writers, using the texts of Paul Celan, Anna Akhmatova, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, and Helen Keller to preface Eisenstein's portraits and connecting her words into one long poem that can be read in any direction. The reader feels "as if all you know and all you don't know/ have changed places." These elements communicate with one another, art in dialog with word, word in dialog with art, to create a "holy ink" in a profound collaboration among poet, portrait, and reader. The result is a poem in which "each word the reverse of a word/ as if to say/ the moment you stop believing in me/ I will disappear." VERDICT Highly recommended for all poetry collections.--Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

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