Correspondences: A Poem and Portraits - Hardcover

Michaels, Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1408836025 ISBN 13: 9781408836026

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013

Synopsis

This beautifully conceived book brings together the best-selling novelist and poet Anne Michaels and the acclaimed artist and writer Bernice Eisenstein in a unique, accordion-style format.

Michaels' resonant book-length poem, a historical and personal elegy, unfolds on one side of the book's pages. On the other side, in unison with the poem, are Bernice Eisenstein's haunting portraits of the twentieth-century writers and thinkers Michaels' poem summons, for whom language was the closest thing to salvation: figures such as Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, W. G. Sebald, Anna Akhmatova, Primo Levi, and Albert Einstein, each accompanied by quotations that illuminate the deeper connections among them. The poem is written to be read in sequence, as well as to join together with the portraits in a dialogue that perfectly reflects the thematic interconnectedness of this collaboration: 'an alphabet of spirits and spirit' (Eisenstein); 'the moment one life/becomes another' (Michaels).

A stunning creation in both form and content, Correspondences is an unforgettable visual and poetic experience and a profound reflection on how the table of history is set by individuals.

About this title

Review:

Michaels is a great poet of loss, and the challenges of memory in the face of it ... Michaels produces passages of lyrical beauty, and eloquently expresses her horror at human violence inflicted on the land and its inhabitants (Guardian)

Her dramas are internal, exquisitely expressed with ... wisdom and precision (Amanda Craig, Daily Telegraph)

Stay if you can with Michaels' gorgeous melancholia even when the waters of her rhetoric rise to the very lip of absurdity...She guides us to the top of some extraordinary peaks of feeling and perception. However rarefied the atmosphere, the vistas are spectacular (Boyd Tonkin, Independent)

A master of deft, pithy images ... there is truth as well as beauty in this dark world (Spectator)

Publishers are celebrating the allure of the beautiful object with editions that make a virtue of the form. Consider a concertina book of letters, Correspondences, from author Anne Michaels (Harper’s Bazaar)

Book Description:

Renowned novelist and poet Anne Michaels and highly acclaimed artist and writer Bernice Eisenstein have created a rare and beautifully produced book that is already causing a stir internationally

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1408836025
• ISBN 13: 9781408836026
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 128