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Loading... Infinite Gradationby Anne Michaels
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) rosscharles | May 19, 2021 |  In this short book that hovers over the boundaries of poetry and prose, Michaels attempts an answer. It is characteristically beautiful and generous, and this book has become one of my all-time favourites. A few lines: "Fiction sets a broken bone in the hope that it will mend straight. It is a plea, a prayer, and because language itself is hope -- the autonomic hope of a voice calling out even in despair, even involuntarily -- fiction seeks the error in a complex mechanism, seeks to reset the human flaw." One thing I've been thinking about in the last few years, as I continue to work in climate change even though the chances of an even moderately happy ending decline by the day, is "there may not be hope, but there's still a point"--a point to trying and working and continuing to try and work even knowing that the outcome may still be terrible. This book helps me to tease out some of the point: knowing that I acted in accordance with my own values, yes, that's one; but also that we can never know the outcome of the work we do, and if we need to know that we'll be heard in a way we ourselves can see and measure, we may never begin. So you do the work anyway, hoping that it will achieve good beyond what you're aware of. (  ) andrea_mcd | Mar 10, 2020 | no reviews | add a review
In this, her first volume of non-fiction, Anne Michaels, the internationally award-winning poet and novelist, author of Fugitive Pieces, reflects on the ethical, emotional and philosophical implications of language and the creative act. She considers the lives of certain artists and writers - Paul Celan, Jack Chambers, Eva Hesse, Etty Hillesum, Nelly Sachs and Claire Wilks - who have made work at the very limits of experience, in remarkably different situations and with radically variant materials. Asking those urgent questions, Michaels explores how the artistic expression of being might serve as a witness in extremis; and she examines the nature of responsibility, and the form it takes in poetry, fiction and image-making, especially in the face of atrocity, when everything is at stake. Infinite Gradation is an astonishing meditation on what art makes of death. In lines as precise and profound as any Michaels has written, it is also a lyrically compelling praise song to love and the enduring mysteries at the core of existence--Back cover. No library descriptions found. 
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)819.454Literature English (North America) American literature in English outside the USA (optional)LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.2)
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