Michael Collier

Each year the Academy honors over 70 composers, artists, architects, and writers with awards and prizes ranging from $5000 to $100,000.

The poems of this collection explore such everyday dualities—how the human need for attachment is as much a source of pain as of vitality and how our longing for transcendence often leads to sinister complicities.

Contemporary poetry seems to be a shell game between narrative, lyric, and metaphoric threads. Collier’s poems are shaped without being metric; he maintains excellent control of the stanza, but if you’re the sort of reader who’s hungry for a couplet you’ll be starving after reading this volume. As for narrative, these poems aren’t stories, and temporal markers only come up every sixty miles or so. Collier’s poems are long, lonely highways with lots of passing metaphor to recreate the motion. The roads are paved; there are signs and gas stations. But you’ll never find these interstates on a map.

A cycle of pathbreaking poems about the history of a family set against the backdrop of the last century.

An Individual History describes the fears, anger, and guilt—personal, familial, societal, political, and historical—that comprise a life. The figure of the speaker’s maternal grandmother who was institutionalized for five decades serves as an overriding metaphor for this haunting, bold new work by an essential American poet.

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Make Us Wave Back includes essays on an expansive list of subjects, among them the literary correspondence of William Maxwell; the meaning of the author's own role as poet laureate of the state of Maryland; the journals of Louise Bogan and how they reveal Bogan's struggle with her own personal fears as well as the reconstruction of herself as a writer; and many more.

National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Michael Collier explores the influences that have made him one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. Make Us Wave Back includes essays on an expansive list of subjects, among them the literary correspondence of William Maxwell; the meaning of the author's own role as poet laureate of the state of Maryland; the journals of Louise Bogan and how they reveal Bogan's struggle with her own personal fears as well as the reconstruction of herself as a writer; and many more.

From a cardinal that crashes into a window to a gathering of turkey vultures, Collier engages birds as myth-makers and lively messengers, carrying memories from lost friends. The mystery of death and the vital absence it creates are the real subjects of the book. Collier juxtaposes moments of quotidian revelation, like waking to the laughing sounds of bird song, with the drama of Greek tragedy, taking on voices from Medea. As Vanity Fair praised, his poems “tread nimbly between moments of everyday transcendence and spiritual pining.”

A haunting orchestra of birds sings through Dark Wild Realm, the elegiac new collection from Michael Collier, whose previous book, The Ledge, was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. From considering the weight of sparrows to urging a cardinal back to life after it crashed into his window, Collier engages birds as messengers and mythmakers, carrying memories from lost friends. As the noted naturalist Pete Dunne praises, Collier "probes the light and dark [and] the layers of human experience the way thrushes turn leaf litter across the forest floor.

 

"Dark splendor" are the words Edward Hirsch uses to describe the poems of the award-winning author Michael Collier. Collier's work balances on the ledge between the everyday and the unknown, revealing the hidden depths of relationships. The poems in The Ledge are narrative and colloquial, musical and crystalline, at once intimate and sharp-edged. The artistry and directness of The Ledge confirm his place among the most significant poets of his generation.

The Neighbor is a book of portraits and portraiture. Like the eccentric and mysteriously heroic citizens of E.A. Robinson's Tilbury Town, Collier's figures haunt a startlingly familiar neighborhood. In clear, rich language, Collier reveals the complexities that emerge from his characters' seemingly uneventful lives.

"Dark splendor" are the words Edward Hirsch uses to describe the poems of the award-winning author Michael Collier. Collier's new work balances on the ledge between the everyday and the unknown, revealing the hidden depths of relationships. The poems in THE LEDGE are narrative and colloquial, musical and crystalline, at once intimate and sharp-edged. They render the world beautifully mysterious as they slide into unexpected emotional territory. A son loses his father's favorite hammer, and with it his trust. In "The Wave," the enthusiastic crowd at a baseball game rises and sits in frightening unison, belying their hopeful cheering.

The Poet Laureate will provide public readings for the citizens of Maryland, ensuring that people in all geographic regions of the State have access to at least one reading during the term of service.