Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...only by virtue of its grand themes but also because of its schizoid scenes and violent characters. Baal is the name of a fertility god, but this play, full of images of rotting food and flesh, charts the progression of an over-ripe and destructive appetite. The bohemian poet, Baal (Daniel Sussner '00), is an enormously charismatic man who desires to eat, fuck, experience and be everything, ultimately even death itself. He is forever yearning for the infinite "purple sky" and the "dark river" as he hurls himself through life. He despises the world of unctuous critics and bourgeois manners...
...stories, Family Dancing (1984), and first novel, The Lost Language of Cranes (1987), were praised for their artful and frank treatment of gay characters and themes. But his ascending career hit a wall with the appearance of While England Sleeps (1993). Leavitt's novel included embroidered scenes from British poet Stephen Spender's 1951 memoir of the Spanish Civil War, World Within World, and Spender was outraged. Claiming incidents from his life had been plagiarized and rendered "pornographic" as well, the poet sued, and Leavitt's novel was removed from sale in Britain and the U.S. A revised version, answering...
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...
With such knowledge, and haunted by the memory of the sister he lost, how will Jakob Beer develop into a distinguished poet and, late in his life, a husband besottedly in love with his young wife? These are the questions that Fugitive Pieces addresses through Jakob's own words: "I try to set down the past in the cramped space of a prayer...
...succeeds, and credit goes to Anne Michaels, who created him. The author, 38, a Canadian poet who has published two volumes of verse, will try the patience of readers who expect brisk forward momentum in their novels. Her prose does not race; it hovers, insinuating its way in and around timeless mysteries. Jakob Beer never lived, but thanks to Michaels, he does now. --By Paul Gray...