AT ODDS WITH HUMILITY

AP2 Books

Michael Collier, My Bishop and Other Poems Chicago: University of Chicago Press Paperback, 80 pages, August 2018

Michael Collier has always been difficult to pigeonhole. Although he has been writing poems steadily since 1986, beginning with The Clasp and Other Poems, published by Wesleyan University Press during a decade in which the series published books by Yusef Komunyakaa, Agha Shahid Ali, Heather McHugh, Jane Hirshfield, James Tate, Marianne Boruch, and Gregory Orr, he has remained something of a reserved outlier. His aesthetic is woefully out of fashion. Or, I might put it, gloriously out of fashion. Which makes him something of a dissident aesthete.

Collier has been teaching in the creative writing program at the University of Maryland since the 1980s and recently stepped down after some two decades as director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Question is, how can someone who appears to be an insider never lose his outsider cred? If you’re the type of reader who reels from the latest fashions in poetry, you won’t want to miss looking in his direction at what is, by my count, his seventh volume of poems. From his snapshot of Jefferson’s bees—“white man’s flies”—and portraits of a lemon, Emily Dickinson, storms, and funky stuff, Collier practices a poetry of domestic restlessness. He sticks to the continuum of what home is and isn’t: worn faces, invisible presences, joyful industries, kitchens with fruit pulp, medicine cabinets, money clips, rent collectors. Often he’s simply measuring passages of time:

When one of my sons turned twenty-five, I calculated how old
I would be when he turned fifty, if I were still alive, and then
it occurred to me that after I die his age will begin
to catch up to mine, until at some point in the future,
if he lives long enough, we will for one year
be the