Summary
A book of 1930s photographs makes an overture. Then, up from the center of the earth, Capacity surfaces on the North Atlantic. It is pulled southeasterly toward the place its language comes from, so dense with wonder at what it meets along the way that it takes nothing for granted. Obsessed with the small, these poems address one by one the things that people need to live. Land, water, sky, food, shelter, thought, talk, sex, and generation: Any person is capacitated in the measure that these things are there as his or her world. Capacity supposes that how this world goes is worthy of being sung. Book jacket. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.
Publishers Weekly Review
McMichael's calm, smart verse essays and poetic narratives attracted critical acclaim, if never a broad following, during the 1980s; his sixth book (the first since 1996's The World at Large: New and Selected) pursues its intellectual ambition with renewed attention and verve, and comprises just seven poems. The lead poem, "The British Countryside in Pictures," provides a frame for the whole, placing the story of Britain's evacuee children (sent from cities to farmland during the Blitz) within contexts from economic history and geology to the beginnings of one child's life. From details and antecedents within this story (perhaps, though McMichael does not specify, the story of his own family) derive the other topics here: the horrors of the Irish potato famine; reproductive science; how we make judgments; how we become ourselves amid the overlapping determinants of social class, locale, memory, biology. "Capacity is both how/ much a thing holds and how/ much it can do," McMichael explains in the title poem, and his work proves capacious in both respects. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From: Reed Elsevier Inc.
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Table of Contents
|
The British Countryside in Pictures |
3 |
|
Above the Red Deep-Water Clays |
19 |
|
Posited |
21 |
|
From the Home Place |
25 |
|
The Issue of Their Loins |
36 |
|
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