Held by Anne Michaels

I was more than thrilled to see the announcement of a new book by Anne Michaels, published this week, Held.

Anne Michaels is well known as a poet, was Toronto’s Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2019. She has had several volumes of poetry published, the first in 1986 The Weight of Oranges. A decade later her first novel, Fugitive Pieces, was published and took the world by storm. The Winter Vault was published in 2009, and now Held.

Held is composed of twelve vignettes, taking place over more than a century. All are linked and all tell a story woven through time and place. We meet photographers, some who find fugitive images on glass plates, images that may or may not give comfort and solace to the recipient of the photograph. There are painters, suffragettes, women of science, widows.

Always, the dead are with us. The beloved, the cherished, those who are missing from our lives. Those who will never come home, no matter how long we wait, how much we wish for their return.

This is a novel written by a poet. Sometimes so few words say so much.  

I found myself, more than once, in tears. That words have this power to cut to our core. I also thought about this book, how important it is at this time. A time of war, of such hatred.

Held is a powerful novel, a reflection on love and grief and what it is to be human. 

I read Held late into the night, and immediately on finishing, found my copy of Fugitive Pieces to re-read. I was a completely different person in 1996 than I am now. We all are. I hate to admit I remembered little of the story Fugitive Pieces tells and found myself at once lost in the story of Jakob Beer, a young boy who emerges out of the mud in Europe, found by a Greek man, Athos, taken to Greece, and thereby rescued from the Holocaust.  Athos becomes parent, educator, and mentor to Jakob. We follow their story from Greece to Toronto. There is horror and there is joy. Always, there is exquisite writing.

While reading both Held and Fugitive Pieces I found myself lamenting the loss of what was once so plentiful – true literary novels of meaning and importance. There are now so few novels that challenge our intellects, that provide pleasure through the beauty of the writing as well as the story. Both of these novels are sometimes hard to read, but we must never forget the horror of the Holocaust – especially now. It must never happen again.