Capacity: Poems

Capacity, the extraordinary new collection from the award-winning poet James McMichael, deliberates an earth that supplies what people need to live. Ocean, land, animate bodies, shelter, thoughts, feelings, talk, sex--each is addressed at the pace of someone dense with wonder's resistance to take for granted even the smallest or most obvious parts of existence.



James McMichael is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The World at Large: New and Selected Poems, 1971-1996. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, and the Shelley Memorial Prize.




A National Book Award Finalist



A book of 1930s photographs makes an overture. Then, up from the center of the earth, Capacity surfaces on the North Atlantic. It is pulled southeasterly toward the place its language comes from, so dense with wonder at what it meets along the way that it takes nothing for granted. Obsessed with the small, these poems address one by one the things that people need to live. Land, water, sky, food, shelter, thought, talk, sex, and generation: Any person is capacitated in the measure that these things are there as his or her world. Capacity supposes that how this world goes is worthy of being sung.




"McMichael is the 13-year cicada of poetry. With roughly the same regularity he surfaces, sheds his old skin and delivers a song that's entirely his own. Since 1980, his sole contributions to the genre (excluding a 'new and selected') have been three book-length poems, each strikingly different from the others and from anything else on the market. In Capacity, he has exchanged the long lines and explicit autobiography of the previous two for dispassion, elision and lines as short as a syllable. What hasn't changed is his commitment to close scrutiny . . . Everything, from immigration patterns to heartsickness, is described in the same objective, almost clinical tone—a strange and wonderful choice, lending disproportionate power to the subtlest gestures."—Eric McHenry, The New York Times Book Review



"McMichael's calm, smart verse essays and poetic narratives attracted critical acclaim, if never a broad following, during the 1980s; his sixth book pursues its intellectual ambition with renewed attention and verve, and comprises just seven poems. The lead poem, 'The British Countryside in Pictures,' provides a frame for the whole, placing the story of Britain's evacuee children (sent from cities to farmland during the Blitz) within contexts from economic history and geology to the beginnings of one child's life. From details and antecedents within this story (perhaps, though McMichael does not specify, the story of his own family) derive the other topics here: the horrors of the Irish potato famine; reproductive science; how we make judgments; how we become ourselves amid the overlapping determinants of social class, locale, memory, biology. 'Capacity is both how/ much a thing holds and how/ much it can do,' McMichael explains in the title poem, and his work proves capacious in both respects."—Publishers Weekly