LUKE YATES
I love Michael’s understated brilliance: his gentle, luminous poems, the eclectic and intuitive workshops (imagine the lives of all those poems), the legendary festival programmes, the books and magazines he’s edited and, generally, the warmth, energy and wit he cultivates in and around the world of poetry. Michael makes things happen, and they are extremely good things. How to possibly take stock of all this, everything he’s giving us? I opened his latest collection this morning, Between Ourselves, and, bookmarked by a receipt for some tomatoes, rocket, bird feed and paper towels, is the typically unassuming poem ‘Hinge’, where the speaker considers the hinges, nails and other bits of metal that outlast furniture and garden bonfires. Its last line ‘Most of what I’ve done I’ve forgotten’ evokes the ungraspable, even while the speaker reaches towards these clues of life so precisely, weighing them in the hand, before ‘lobbing them into the barrow’, a lovely Laskey line. And the poem ‘Quick’ describes the poetry of a granddaughter learning to speak ‘before / she learns to mean / to please’ as, of course, a poet does. It is also about ‘weighing’ the passing of time, a recurring and frequently arresting theme. In some way, then, Michael has not only done all these extremely good things, forgotten or otherwise: he also shows a way of doing, in his work, what we are doing in these pages about his work. Happy birthday, Michael.
Quick
Quick, before
she learns to mean
to please and while
you’re still full of it,
in awe again
at every new
more or less
plausible
word of hers,
hardwire today’s –
how following
your conversation-
stopping sneeze
bless you she said
and perhaps because
she liked the sound
of it so much
she blessed you twice,
and then a third time
when you coughed.
MICHAEL LASKEY