The Weight of Oranges/Miner's Pond
Poems
- Publisher
- McClelland & Stewart
- Initial publish date
- Apr 1997
- Category
- Canadian, Places, Women Authors
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780771058783
- Publish Date
- Apr 1997
- List Price
- $18.99
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Description
Prior to her stunning début novel, Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels had already won prizes and acclaim for her two poetry collections. The Weight of Oranges and Miner’s Pond are now brought back into print in this one-volume collector’s edition.
Published in 1986, The Weight of Oranges created a sensation, garnering the kind of praise rarely accorded a first book of poems. It went on to win the Commonwealth Prize for the Americas. Miner’s Pond appeared in 1991 and received the Canadian Authors Association Award, and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award and the Trillium Award.
About the author
ANNE MICHAELS is a novelist and poet. Her books have been translated into more than fifty languages and have won dozens of international awards, including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. Among many other honours, she is a Royal Society of Literature International Writer, a Guggenheim Fellow, has received honorary degrees, and has served as Toronto’s Poet Laureate. Her novel Fugitive Pieces was adapted as a feature film and was chosen as one of the BBC’s 100 Novels that Shaped the World. Her latest novel, Held, was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and won the 2024 Giller Prize.
Excerpt: The Weight of Oranges/Miner's Pond: Poems (by (author) Anne Michaels)
PHANTOM LIMBS
“The face of the city changes more quickly, alas! than the mortal heart.”
- Charles Baudelaire
So much of the city
is our bodies. Places in us
old light still slants through to.
Places that no longer exist but are full of feeling,
like phantom limbs.
Even the city carries ruins in its heart.
Longs to be touched in places
only it remembers.
Through the yellow hooves
of the ginkgo, parchment light;
in that apartment where I first
touched your shoulders under your sweater,
that October afternoon you left keys
in the fridge, milk on the table.
The yard — our moonlight motel —
where we slept summer’s hottest nights,
on grass so cold it felt wet.
Behind us, freight trains crossed the city,
a steel banner, a noisy wall.
Now the hollow diad
floats behind glass
in office towers also haunted
by our voices.
Few buildings, few lives
are built so well
even their ruins are beautiful.
But we loved the abandoned distillery:
stone floors cracking under empty vats,
wooden floors half rotted into dirt,
stairs leading nowhere, high rooms
run through with swords of dusty light.
A place the rain still loved, its silver paint
on rusted things that had stopped moving it seemed, for us.
Closed rooms open only to weather,
pungent with soot and molasses,
scent-stung. A place
where everything too big to take apart
had been left behind.
