Michael Gessner: Selected Poems

From the Foreword by Tyler Meier: To my ear, Michael Gessner’s oeuvre chimes distinctly and gorgeously with Merrillesque tones, but piqued with Auden’s love of the clear-eyed. This is a collection interested in way-finding across a life’s work; it is Keatsian in its capabilities, both of the negative sort and not. The range in what follows is some of the pleasure and basis for my associative comparisons and echoes; consider the great Parisian sequences from Transversales; the animal that gets at the animus in us all in Beast Book; the inclusiveness of the poems in Artificial Life, domestic, spectral occasions for wonder and the pleasure of a poetic intellect in full form. Surfaces brings ekphrasis to bear, reminding ultimately that the way we see a piece of art and the attention we pay it is perhaps the same attention and earnestness we owe the everyday world, this everyday museum of our lived experiences. Finally, the poems in Earthly Bodies are also the early bodies in the oeuvre, and many signal as beacons the concerns that filter throughout Gessner’s poetry: the domestic and the unfamiliar; the relationship between the banal and wonder; the shared public history of a place and the private moments that define our connections to spaces.