All We Saw

In All We Saw, Anne Michaels returns with strikingly original poems to explore one of her essential concerns: "what love makes us capable of, & incapable of." Here are the ways in which passion must accept, must insist, that "death . . . give / not only take from us."

This piercing short collection treats desire in a style that is chaste, spare, figuratively modulated, & almost classical in its precision. In lyrics that ponder what happens to the bodies of lovers—so vital when together, different when apart, death coming to one before the other—Michaels embraces both the intimacy & the vastness of the connection between two people.

Love's sheltering understanding is a powerful presence in all the poems, with its particular imagery (the ringing fog, the white page of the bed), as is the shattering...

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Anne Michaels is a Canadian novelist & poet. She has won dozens of international awards, including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, & the Lannan Award for Fiction. Among many other honours she is a Guggenheim Fellow, has received honorary degrees, & has served as Toronto’s Poet Laureate. Her novel Fugitive Pieces was adapted as a feature film. Her most recent books include All We Saw, Infinite Gradation, & Railtracks (co-written with 1972 Booker Prize winner John Berger).