Michael's work beautifully negotiates a complex territory between lyric utterance and a more experimental, intertextual or 'open' mode of composition. I am struck by the fineness of his ear and of his syntactic timing, and by the interplay of intelligence and feeling. While Michael's style is produced to a certain extent by method, its beauty can only come from his talent selecting, arranging, and perhaps intervening in the results of that method, as an essential contributing factor in the process and product. He is a serious, informed, talented poet.