Great Regulars: Whether she's feeling her way into the mind

of Marie Curie, devastated by the death of her husband ("I pulled apart your coat/looking for you. I kissed your cloth shadow . . .") or casting back to the lares and penates of her own childhood ("The ritual walk to the bakery, Fridays/before supper. Guided by my eldest brother/through streets made unfamiliar by twilight . . ."), [Anne] Michaels uses her poetry to excavate her chosen themes of love, language and memory in lines so rangy that at times they press up against the edges of what the medium is capable of containing.

"I haven't written poetry in a long time," she says now, "though I'd like to think maybe I'll go back to it, when I'm wiser. But it's such a good discipline for a novelist: it makes you aware that even if you have four or five hundred pages to play with, you mustn't waste a single word."

from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: Anne Michaels, fugitive author

~~~~~~~~~~~