Laurel Johnson Book Review "Battles and Lullabies"

Battles & Lullabies

by Richard Michelson

Battles and Lullabies
by Richard Michelson
ISBN 0-252-07303-7
88 pages at $18.95 paperback
University of Illinois Press
1325 South Oak Street
Champaign IL 61820-6903

Richard Michelson is a well-known writer of children's books and the recipient of several poetry awards His poems have been described as witty, shrewd, and beautifully modulated Yes, they are that, but also shattering, powerful and, occasionally, gently erotic Through the weaving of well-chosen words, the poet memorializes the courage and tenacity of Jewish ancestors and the simple, everyday happenings of life.

In this excerpt from "Like Nobody's Business" Michelson remembers his father while showing his college-age son the old neighborhood:

It's a war on poverty, I tell my son We're driving through the old neighborhood, and I'm boring even myself, pointing out the burned-out empty lots, like they're holes in my own heart.

"Counting to Six Million" is a psalm of wonderful and terrible beauty as a father remembers the Holocaust, and fears what impact the future might have on his son:

I want to set my heels once more in the soft underbelly of his childhood, airlift him from danger, from disease, from all his fears, which are maybe not even his fears at all, but only mine Yet now as he hovers above me, my body splayed out like my father's before me, my every breath is less a prayer than a love letter torn open in desperation.

"Faraway Landscape" is based on a pen and ink drawing discovered at Buchenwald in 1944 The poet lives for a moment in that awful dying place, watching the artist:

O, how I've come to hate his scratching late each night, his fruit trees carved into some moldy crust of bread He doesn't care that starved men envy their own dead He hears our cries but will not document our pain Instead… he draws, knowing each line could be his last, some Palestine, some faraway landscape as if he could escape this world imagining the future or the past.

Sections on the art of Edvard Munch and other artists are exceptional exercises in ekphrasis—poetry inspired by art Munch's art has been reviled and revered because he painted what he saw whether the focus was considered obscene or divine by critics Effective ekphrastic poetry is not easy to write, but Michelson makes it look simple as he views paintings by Munch, Cassat, Toulouse Lautrec, Picasso, and others.

To learn more about this gifted writer, poet, and art advocate, visit www.rmichelson.com.

review by Laurel Johnson