Skin Divers

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

One of the poems in Anne Michaels’s book is about Marie Curie,
discoverer of radium. The work of Anne Michaels glows like radium with
an intensity of emotion. Most of the poems talk about love, but not in a
sentimental way. Her best work in Skin Divers comes in
“Fontanelles,” a sequence about childbirth, and “Last Night’s
Moon,” a poem that explores love through an astonishing sequence of
images ranging from astronomy and painting to evolution
and—surprisingly—a bog. The least successful poem is “Ice
House,” about Kathleen Scott, widow of the Arctic explorer Robert
Falcon Scott; this work seems an exercise, without the emotional
compulsions of the other works. Michaels can write about love without
embarrassment. As Robert Graves says about the muse, “Nothing is
promised which is not performed.” Michaels is in touch with a genuine
muse.