Forest of Wild Hands

In these moving poems, Judy Michaels illuminates an intense period of five years in her life: against a backdrop that celebrates her young students, an enduring marriage, and the power of music and mountains, she writes about the sudden loss of her mother to cancer, her father's ensuing depression and alcoholism, and her own experience with ovarian cancer. Michaels's witty, passionate style and wide range of subject matter set her collection above raw confessionalism - as the title of one poem asserts, ""You Don't Need Another Cancer Poem."" With its fresh look at all-too-familiar situations, the narrative establishes a spirit of celebration and independence that accounts for the poet's resilience in the face of loss. She tells us about cheese-rolling contests in England, what it's like to have a mother with emerald-chocolate-streak eyes, and how to teach jumping at a teachers' convention. One poem delineates the anatomy and metaphysics of viola jokes. Another implies that French kissing is just as good at 54 as at 17. Favorite poets drift through the book, too - Jane Kenyon, Akhmatova and Tsvetayeva, Bishop and Rukeyser, Basho, Shikibu, and Rumi. And when, near the end, Michaels envisions putting her mother on the Brooklyn ferry, a tactless but reassuring Walt Whitman is on board.