If You Can Tell
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A poignant new collection with visionary clarity from a National Book Award finalist
If You Can Tell, the new book of poems by James McMichael, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2006, takes up what it might mean that the word was in the beginning, before which there may not have been “empty / space, / even, / nor the thought of it.” A baby is conceived after a verbal exchange between his parents. He’s born and learns to talk. Told that the grandfather he cherishes has died, he unknowingly silences any memory of the man. To his Sunday school class a few years later, he tells the lie that he himself was born in China. The boy grows up into a vexing faith. Though he expects his own death will be final, God is no less God to him in the life he's been given and must in time give back.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his seventh collection, composed of eight long poems, McMichael (Capacity) fusses over questions of what is unseen and what is assumed as he ponders god and the oft-tautological nature of religion. Imagining that he is born from a mere wish, the speaker erases memory at will word games accumulate before giving way to a rumination on life's stages. In a life that is both full and oddly incomplete, the hollow parts fill with a longing for wonder that turns into an attempt at religion. The speaker gets caught up in insecurities over a lack of strong faith: "I wanted to be asleep so I wouldn't go on making// God up out of the wind." In plain and measured language, McMichael stumbles toward a sort of revelation that Death, silent, hovers in the background: "Under its breath it primes me to pay up and look pleasant." The poems reflect the muddled, late-life process of sorting memory into a cohesive whole, but there is a disconnect: McMichael never reveals why this search for god and the unseen happens aside from the fact of aging. The language grows repetitive and convoluted, an effect further amplified by his lineation and enjambment. These are narratives attempting to find their source myth, and though there are great moments, none of the poems really linger in the mind for long.
