Each in a Place Apart

McMichael's ( Four Good Things ) extraordinary long poem, Each in a Place Apart , charts the course of the author's relationship with his second wife, Linda. The two meet during his first marriage, conduct a prolonged affair, eventually get married and then, after years of love and work and the birth of a child, break up. Little is unusual about the story; it is common in its own right and as the familiar occasion of many contemporary poems. But McMichael's work sets itself apart with an almost surreal dispassion and precision. The poem is a sequence: set sometimes in the past tense, but mostly in the present, it moves chronologically yet discontinuously through the incidents of a shared life, no one detail commanding any more notice than another. A similar combination of discontinuity and even-handedness marks the separate sections: recollection, confession, observation and simple bafflement devolve with a weird matter-of-factness. In this way, however, McMichael gives lyric focus and intensity to his autobiographical narrative. The isolation of moments and the drift of events reflect the isolation of people and their powerlessness before fate, as well as the poignancy of their seeming understandings. At the same time, the poem's very exactness of detail, together with the self-effacing polish of its lines, can make McMichael appear a person almost terrifyingly withdrawn from the fact of his own life--as any of us might be. This strangely becalmed book about human estrangement is telling, painful, beautiful. (Apr.)