“Like the seasonal concertos written by the composer for whom Michael Hanner has named this collection, the poems herein mix a fine lyric tenderness with something more autumnal and even darker in their moments of coldest imagining. I was deeply taken by the poems' thoughtful oppositions of memory and language. This is the kind of refined bittersweetness we seek from poetry, knowing the salt is absolutely necessary to our brighter pleasures. Really a beautiful accomplishment.”
—Erin Belieu
“This is a book you can flip through like a breeze through a photo album on the screen porch of a summer house you rented from the author. You lived through many of the same titular years Michael Hanner evokes, probably, and his seasoned stories—a certain wet spring in London, Lake Michigan in November—may set you dreaming of your own exotic summers and winters. Some things here, though, will remain opaque, singular, clearly expressed but nearly incommunicable, incomprehensible except in how wryly and sprightly they lead us through the stages of Hanner‘s history of illusions and disillusions, and insist—with superb fidelity to the moment and the slightest shrug—that although there may have once been more to life, this is what‘s left.”
—Robert Hill Long
“Rhythm and musical forms—ragtime, the “sound of rain on the truck roof,” violins, bebop, duets, diesel locomotives, arias, Bach, “even the tango”—underpin Vivaldi, Michael Hanner‘s new collection. Subtitled “An Autobiography,” Hanner explores his American history, European landscapes, and human—and natural—change in poems that slowly develop into a fugue of lyric meditation. Warning us, “I forget so easily,” Vivaldi is an exhortation to the continuity of life: “Behind me winds a vast landscape./There is the Mississippi/rolled back onto its reel.””
—Jordan Hartt
Architect Michael Hanner‘s work has appeared in Gargoyle, Rhino, MARGIE, Nimrod, C.A.B., Cloudbank, and many others. His most recent chapbooks are Winter Dreams (2011) and The Architecture of Holland (2012). His outside interests are gardening, irony, English croquet, French cooking, Argentine tango and photography. He lives in Eugene, Oregon with his wife, poet Toni Hanner.
