All We Saw

From the internationally celebrated author of Fugitive Pieces and the Griffin Poetry Prize-shortlisted collection Correspondences -- and Toronto's Poet Laureate -- comes a profoundly moving new collection of poetry of love and memory.<br/><br/>In All We Saw, Anne Michaels returns to poetry with strikingly original lyrics to explore one of her essential concerns: "what love makes us capable of, and incapable of." In this passionate, piercing short collection, dedicated to the late Mark Strand, Michaels explores "love's dare / love's repair / a single stitch." 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 -- she embraces both the intimacy and the vastness of the connection between two people. The complete and sheltering understanding of a great love 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 loss of its end.<br/>Lyrics of various forms and two longer poems explore desire in a style chaste, spare, figuratively modulated, calm and almost classical in its precision. By the book's end, we are left with a renewed awareness of the mystery at the core of our astonishing lives. With Michaels, we enter a space that is "not inside / nor outside: dusk's / doorway," where memory might be kept alive.