UI Press | Richard Michelson | Battles and Lullabies

Battles and Lullabies

An ambitious poetry of love and witness

With his father gunned down in a petty robbery and his aunt haunted by the threats of the Gestapo, Richard Michelson's experiences growing up in Brooklyn were far from ordinary, yet they remain all too common--too much a part of ongoing violence--to be dismissed as merely private events, safely past. In Counting to Six Million he writes out memory, anxiety, and grief, worry over his wife and children, and the recurring clashes between love and cruelty that test wisdom with suffering, day after day.

"'Life is not poetry,' says an old woman in Richard Michelson's Battles and Lullabies. The poems of this book ask with urgent eloquence how the sweetness of life can be sheltered from the terrors of our time, and what art can make of such a world as ours. Michelson's poems are artful, humane and true."--Richard Wilbur, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry

"In Battles and Lullabies, Michelson questions the very act of writing as against the exigencies of Eros and death, and does this with a mix of artistic authority, verve, toughness, humor, and often with extraordinary tenderness. He has captured the spirit and deep abiding spirituality of three millennia and more of Jewish experience: the tragedy, yes, as in teaching his son to count to six million as a fitting Kaddish for the dead, but even more importantly, the vigor and resiliency of his beloved tribe. Beyond that there is a bracing understanding of the beauty and dynamic force of human sexuality. All of this is caught in a language which continually refreshes and surprises at every turn. Here in Michelson's work is a complex, self-examining ars poetica, and--even more importantly--a viable and celebratory ars vitae as well."--Paul Mariani, poet, and biographer of W.C. Williams, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Gerard Manley Hopkins

"I greatly admire Michelson's poems: witty, shrewd, rapidly turning on a dime in some cases, and in others beautifully modulated in delicate shades of elegy."--Anthony Hecht, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry

Richard Michelson is best known as an author of books for children, including Ten Times Better, Grandpa's Gamble, and his newest, Happy Feet. He is the recipient of the Felix Pollack Prize in Poetry, the New Letters Literary Award, and was a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize. He is also the author of Tap Dancing for the Relatives and Masks. His poems have appeared in New Letters, Poetry Northwest, the Norton Introduction to Poetry, and other anthologies.