The Weight of Oranges

Donalee Moulton-Barrett was a writer and editor in Halifax.

“The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” That line, from the poem “Memoriam” in The Weight of Oranges, aptly describes the reader’s reaction to this collection of poetry by Anne Michaels. It is an astonishing work and the reader is left lovingly hungering for more.

What, in one sense, makes The Weight of Oranges an “astonishing” collection, is that this is Anne Michaels’ first published book of poetry. But unlike many first collections, The Weight of Oranges does not superficially search for meaning, strain for depth or insight. Anne Michaels’ work is polished, penetrating, and tremendously powerful. Like these lines from “A Height Of Years”: “We become inaccurate. / Someone you love with tubes down his throat / shows you every which way you can’t love him. / Blood, that euphemism for what moves in us.”

Michaels creates vivid, often unique, images to craft her language, but it remains a global language readers understand as it applies both individually and universally. Particularly strong and evocative are the poems about death and love, the essence of relationships. “Sometimes I’m certain those who are happy / know one thing more than us... or one thing less. / The only book I’d write again / is our bodies closing together” (from the title poem).

Anne Michaels is not yet 30 and already her sense of observation is acute, her analysis incisive. There are lines in The Weight of Oranges that stun with their accurate simplicity, their implosive reality: “The only experience unchanged by recollection / is horror. Like forgiveness, love is practical” (from “Pushed into the Dark)”.

There has been an incredible amount of thought, and tenderness, put into The Weight of Oranges. The result is one helluva book of poetry from one helluva poet.