Lure

by Michals, Nils

• ISBN13: 9780807130070
• ISBN10: 0807130079
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-06-01
• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr

Summary

Nils Michals has a marvelous knack for putting unexpected words in unexpected places -- and for composing whole poems of such surprises. In these dense, rich lyric poems, he touches the mythical and the quotidian with the same gleamingly precise sensibility. This is a striking collection that's not afraid of beauty or emotion -- nor of the difficulties they have always presented to poetry. Nils Michals extends to us a world of radiant detail -- sometimes the world feels painfully beautiful -- and eerie inner song. Moving between quietly charged description and sweeps of anguish and abrupt joy, Michals is always aware of how his attention treads on the landscapes and people it follows. "Have I looked too much / or hard? Some damage to the hills, / uncroppable fields..." In the almost timeless, flickering sequence of images, everything -- ships, mirrors, snow, the curve of earth itself -- carries within it a darkened silence, and the poems constantly approach some worldless strain that precedes rapture. This is a haunted, expansive terrain of feeling, "an iridescence, an ocean," as Robert Duncan once said, "the lure of the world / I love." These are silvery poems, shimmering with the cold light of Scandinavia and the North. Of sculptors and kings, of sea voyages and scientists. Of doomed airplanes in their last descent; but of ordinary urban life also. For these are human poems, too, and wise in the minor desolations of the deathbound heart. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Nils Michals holds an MFA from the University of Montana and now lives in San Francisco. His poems appear in jubilat, Indiana Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal

Table of Contents

Westerly	1	(1)
Revolving Around Tycho Brahe: Wenceslas Square	2	(2)
Stradivari, 1736	4	(1)
Diodic	5	(3)
Desperation Series	8	(1)
Desperation Series	9	(1)
Desperation Series	10	(1)
After Surgery	11	(2)
Southerly	13	(1)
The Stone Letters	14	(6)
Untitled	20	(1)
Lesser Season (I)	21	(1)
The Puppet Shop	22	(2)
Parable	24	(3)
Prayer	27	(1)
In the Tattoo Parlor	28	(1)
Lesser Season (II)	29	(1)
Northerly	30	(1)
Lesser Season (III)	31	(1)
Aloha	32	(1)
The Swords Project	33	(2)
Project for a Swordfight	35	(1)
Of the Motion of the Heart and Blood	36	(2)
The Ambulance Came & We Know How That Goes	38	(2)
Horses of the Sun (1)	40	(1)
Horses of the Sun (2)	41	(1)
Horses of the Sun (3)	42	(1)
Horses of the Sun (4)	43	(1)
Horses of the Sun (5)	44	(1)
Horses of the Sun (6)	45	(1)
Horses of the Sun (7)	46	(2)
Easterly	48	(1)
Lure	49	(16)
Notes	65