Anne Michaels

Anne Michaels (born April 15, 1958, Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian poet and novelist who won the Commonwealth Prize as well as the Trillium Book Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction (later the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction) and who is known internationally for the beauty and precision of her language and the depth of her philosophical themes. Her book Correspondences (2013), an elegy to her father with illustrations by Bernice Eisenstein, was short-listed for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Early life and poetry

Anne Michaels, the daughter of a Polish-Jewish father, grew up in Toronto and earned a BA in Honours English at the University of Toronto, where she was later an adjunct faculty member in the English department.

Michaels is first and foremost a poet. Her first collection, The Weight of Oranges, won the 1986 Commonwealth Prize for the Americas. The Weight of Oranges combines an exploration of the sensual body and its experience of the natural world with the nature of memory and of a past that is haunted by the Holocaust. Rooted in autobiography and erotically charged, Michaels’s poems are aching evocations of loss—of childhood, of youth, and of love. “Words for the Body,” the final poem in The Weight of Oranges, begins:

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We knew we’d reached Dunn Lake
because the trees stopped.


Chilled and sweating under winter clothes
we stood in the damp degenerated afternoon.
We grew up waiting together by water,
frozen or free,
in summer under the cool shaggy umbra of firs,
or in the aquarium light of birches.


It’s always been this way between us.
We reach lakes and then just stand there.
Silence fills us with silence.

Michaels’s poems are also replete with allusions to the artists, musicians, writers, and scientists whom she admires—Canadian painter Jack Chambers and French sculptor Auguste Rodin, Ludwig van Beethoven and Polish-Jewish harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, Russian poets Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetayeva, and physicist chemist Marie Curie. The Weight of Oranges was followed by Miner’s Pond (1991), which was nominated for the Governor General’s Award and won the Canadian Authors Association Award, and Skin Divers (1999). Poems (2000) combines Michaels’s first three books in one volume.

Correspondences (2013) is a book-length poem that serves as an elegy for the poet’s father as it forms a broader meditation on memory, history and language. As in Michaels’s earlier books, Correspondences invokes a variety of artistic and intellectual inspirations and ancestors, including such figures as Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, Anna Akhmatova, Primo Levi, and Albert Einstein. Inventively constructed in an accordion format (its pages pleated and folded like the instrument), the book also includes 26 gouache portraits by Toronto artist and author Bernice Eisenstein. The book was short-listed for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize. In the poetry collection All We Saw (2017), Michaels reflected on loss, including the deaths of writers Mark Strand and John Berger.

Novels

Michaels’s first novel, Fugitive Pieces (1996), brought her national recognition and awards, including the Trillium Book Award and the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award (later the Amazon.ca First Novel Award). The novel also garnered international acclaim, winning Britain’s Orange Prize for Fiction and America’s Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. Robert Fulford observed that Fugitive Pieces “attracted more international praise than any first novel by a serious writer in Canadian history.”

In prose as dense, sensuous, and imagistic as her verse, Fugitive Pieces pursues themes of memory, loss, time, and history but also the power, immediacy, and beauty of the natural world. The novel follows the life of Jakob Beer, a Jewish boy rescued from the mud and horror of Nazi-occupied Poland by Athos, a Greek geologist. His parents murdered by the Nazis and his beloved sister Bella disappeared, Jakob is taken to Greece and then to Toronto, where he goes on to become a translator and well-known poet, exploring the Holocaust’s dark heritage. After his death in Greece, Jakob’s legacy is pursued by his young friend and acolyte Ben, a professor obsessed by literature, meteorology, and the trauma of the Holocaust brought to Canada by his survivor parents. In Greece searching for Jakob’s notebooks, Ben fuses the impact of lightning with the reality of time and loss. “A thousand accumulated moments come to fruition in a few seconds,” he writes. “Your cells are reassembled. Struck, your metal melted. Your burnt shape is branded into the chair, vacancy where you once inhabited society.” A film version of Fugitive Pieces, directed by Jeremy Podeswa, was produced in 2006.

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Michaels’s second novel, The Winter Vault (2009), begins with a couple, Jean and Avery, living on a houseboat beneath the temple of Abu Simbel in Egypt during the construction of the Aswan Dam in the 1960s. Avery is one of the engineers tasked with dismantling and reassembling the temple on higher ground. A tale about the fragility of history and the complexity of its preservation, The Winter Vault was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize (2009), the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best Book (2010), and the Trillium Book Award.

The original version of this entry was published by The Canadian Encyclopedia.