Word: poets
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From this bleak beginning, Michaels plunges into this fictional poet's memories, which he set down in two notebooks in the months before his death. These recollections begin with the event, more than a half-century earlier, that changed his life: the night the Nazi soldiers came to his parents' house in their Polish village. Jakob, then seven, was still small enough to fit into the hiding place behind a wall, but his sister Bella, 15, was not. The aging poet remembers what happened next with understated anguish: "The burst door. Wood ripped from hinges, cracking like ice under...
Anne Michaels takes some audacious risks in Fugitive Pieces (Knopf; 294 pages; $23), not the least of them being a brief introductory passage that reveals her novel's conclusion. "Poet Jakob Beer, who was also a translator of posthumous writing from the war, was struck and killed by a car in Athens in the spring of 1993, at age sixty. His wife had been standing with him on the sidewalk; she survived her husband by two days. They had no children...
This extraordinarily compressed passage, appearing early in the novel, sets the tone for much that follows. Michaels not only creates an imaginary poet, she also examines the ways in which a poetic imagination can arise out of horror. That Jakob survives at all is a miracle. After days of hiding, he is finally driven by hunger to risk his fate by approaching a stranger. "I screamed into the silence the only phrase I knew in more than one language, I screamed it in Polish and German and Yiddish, thumping my fists on my own chest: dirty Jew, dirty Jew, dirty...
...poet Hoffmann is protected by his Muse, in the form of his sidekick Nicklausse (Caprice Corona). As he stumbles into the beer hall, he is cajoled into singing about the disfigured "Kleinzach" and then into recounting the stories of these past three loves, now embodied in his present love interest, the opera diva Stella (played alternately by Hilary Snow and K.T. Lawson), who will later be stolen by his enemy Lindorf (Joshua Benaim...
...many respects our best teacher," said Assistant Director of Expository Writing Gordon C. Harvey. "He is a wonderful poet, a superb teacher and a brilliant administrator...