The Island

Michael White

While he was poet laureate of the United States (1990-1991), Mark Strand selected this book for publication with special funds administered by the National Endowment for the Arts, saying, “No first book in memory has so much wisdom, so much lyric conviction as Michael White’s The Island. I find his poems astonishingly mature, profound, evocative.”
 
White’s poems rise from the dark interstices of memory and imagination, his brief love poems of uncannily bright phrasing providing counterpoint to his mastery of elegiac meditation. He knows the water-world of rivers and bays and boats so intuitively that his rhythms of language and image often convey a parallel sense of time and motion, his eye for luminous detail elevating an already impressive gift for narrative.
 
White’s imaginative world is like no other in contemporary poetry. He evokes Emersonian themes as comfortably as he explores a range of verse forms, his landscapes gravitating toward an art of fleeting illusory grace.

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ISBN: 9781556590504

Format: Paperback

Postcard

All the west
Lay clear and luminous, blue

And purple and pure dark crimson
And then it rained like a soft shadow

Into the trees. If I could tell you
Anything, it would be how the rivers

Of aspen lining the northern ravines
Of Grandeur Peak, just turning then,

And far more gold than their riffling leaves
Could hold, were spilling them upwards, into

The air, like bright arpeggios;
How the switchbacks coiled down through

Those caverns of flames of the incandescent
Maples and oaks that live up there;

And how—if I had looked—the city
Beneath, beyond the canyon mouth,

Shook out its tentacles of lights.
If you see this, love, imagine my descent

Through waves of enormous color, the ache
In my legs which vanished with the hour

In a dreamlike glaze of orange light,
And picture me floating down through the fires

Of this day and the next.

About the Author

Michael White was born in 1956. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri and the University of Utah (PhD, 1990), and has taught creative writing at the University of Missouri, the University of Utah, and Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. He has received many awards, including the Academy of American Poets Prize.

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Reviews

“The figures that the speaker presents are haunting… White is interested in the fleeting beauty of this life.” —Publishers Weekly

“White’s lyric poems might be better expected in a fourth collection than a first. He has a great eye for the natural image, whether of the mountains or the sea, and he knows the names of the objects he describes. White’s talents overwhelm. Beautifully packaged by Copper Canyon Press, and very highly recommended.” —Choice

“[White’s] greatest gifts to us are his vivid, precise and complex descriptions of natural phenomena… There are many poems here touched by greatness, each testifying to the genius of an unusually gifted young poet.” —Western American Literature

“As a collection, it has a remarkable narrative and thematic cohesion… The language is lush and graceful… His poems have a way of seeing, then seeing again, which is unusual and haunting.” —Harvard Review