The World at Large: New and Selected Poems 1971-1996 (Phoenix Poets)

I first became familiar with Jim McMichael when I enrolled in his "Joyce's Ulysses" course in the Winter of 2004. I'd always felt that at some point in my life I'd read Ulysses, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity... well, that, and the fact that this class fulfilled a requirement that I needed to graduate.

In those seminars I came to appreciate McMichael's intense patience in both his students' understanding of the concepts put forth in the close readings of texts, and in his belief that Ulysses is the "most readable book in the language." Until then, I'd never read any author such as Joyce with the careful and profound approach that Jim gave to everything he analyzed and everyone he met.

Back then, all I knew of Jim McMichael was that he taught Ulysses , and that he did it better than anyone I knew did anything else. Later that year, a collegue of mine had enthusiastically approached me with 'The World at Large'. My initial response was 'oh, cool, Jim writes poems'. Knocking me upside the head, my friend quickly opened the book and directed my attention to the first piece in his book length poem 'Each in a Place Apart'. I had to sit down for a minute to really grasp what it was that was happening; this virtuoso instructor who only a few months prior had introduced me to the capabilities and possibilities of language through James Joyce was once again doing it through his own writing.

Though my very personal connection to McMichael's writing is somewhat due to my friendship with him, it was ultimately the knowledge the voice in his poems have with the particulars of our most intimate and forgettable moments with ourselves and with others that ultimately won me over. 'The World at Large' covers the vast scope of Jim's poetry, beginning with his short collection entitled 'The Vegetables' which is an intensely moving and focused account of the different stages of cancer, its affects on a person's life, and on that person's family.

The next poem is the booklength 'Each in a Place Apart', a photographic, episodic collection of sharp narrative-like verse about a man's failed first marriage due to the prospects of an affair that cant wait and ultimately divide the narrator from his past, and a future he and his potential love could never fulfill for each other.

This is followed up by another tremendous booklength poem, 'Four Good Things', McMichael's story of Pasadena, California, as he remembers it through his childhood experiences and in which the adult narrator lets itself listen to again. One of the most interesting things to pay attention to in this piece is the way in which McMichael watches his hometown change with the needs of the town's people, and how the over-planning of the city, in many ways, reflects man's instinctual insecurities about those things that are out of his control. (nature, innevitable dangers and ends)

My favorite in this collection is 'Itinerary', written in the voice of a journeyman traveling the unexplored regions of the Louisiana purchase, coming head on with the unpredicatable, the vast unknown terrain that has been declared his, and the silent anxieties we all experience when we first enter into a new world.

The book ends with some of McMichaels most recent and graceful poems, my favorites being 'She', 'Pretty Blue Apron', and the title poem, 'The World at Large'. This is writing you live with, this is a great poet writing at his full capacity.

The World at Large: New and Selected Poems 1971-1996 (Phoenix Poets)

James McMichael

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