Reviews
Michael Heller - Thursday, March 1, 2007
It was a wet and horrible night and so audience numbers were, unsurprisingly, a bit down, but all of us who made it out to the solo reading and talk by New York-based poet and essayist Michael Heller spent an evening that’ll linger long in the mind. Mike began with early work from the mid-sixties collected in A Look at the Door with the Hinges Off, getting feet tapping with the slinky ‘OK everybody, let’s do the Mondriaan stomp’. He mingled poems with autobiographical reflection, describing how he’d started writing more or less by accident while working as an engineer, after encountering workmates who were friends of Louis Zukofsky. Moving on to work from Exigent Futures, the ‘New and Selected’ volume published by Salt in 2003, he continued the theme of personal reflection and the shaping of a life with such poems as ‘Knowledge’ from the sequence of that name, and the dazzling ‘Stanzas at Maresfield Gardens’, on Freud’s house in Hampstead, with its mesmerising villanelle-like conclusion. He treated us to some new unpublished work before a talk, in part two, about Dante’s presence in the poetry of Charles Reznikoff. As with the poems, the clarity and human warmth of what he had to say were a delight. ‘A feeding-frenzy!’ he afterwards jested as – was it any surprise? – all the books he’d brought to sell disappeared from the table the minute he’d finished.
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