American Anthem reviewed in PIR (Poetry Ireland Review #144) by Maureen Boyle
American Anthem, by Kelly Michels, handsomely published by The Gallery Press, is also a collection that straddles two worlds – the America of her childhood and young adulthood, and Ireland. This is her first collection, and was nominated for a Forward Prize, the Felix Dennis Prize for the Best First Collection of 2024. It is an astonishing book and has a sense of awful urgency that is rare in poetry.
The title of the first section, ‘The Quickening’, has many meanings in this context, as the book moves to a soundtrack of sirens and a childhood haunted by the hazel eyes of a mother lost to drugs, a single figure who personalises the shocking statistics of some of the poems’ epigraphs – the fact for example, that more than one million Americans have died from overdoses during the opioid epidemic. Michels recalls the experience of life for herself and others as children living in a reality that is hard to comprehend . . .
The destructiveness of her mother is told dispassionately in ‘Groceries’ – how she has taken money from savings accounts, forged cheques, stolen Christmas presents; and devastatingly in ‘What I Mean When I Say He Went Peacefully’, dedicated to the grandfather, whose wedding ring her mother stole – both original and replacement – so that as he dies in the hospice . . .
The second part of the book, ‘American Anthem’, explores the evil banality of America’s gun culture . . . There is a sense that nothing changes as she thinks the town into the future, and in ‘Two Months Later’ it is still the sleepy seaside town where,
Nothing has changed
not the two addicts passed out behind the 7-n
purring to sleep like warm kittens,
an American flag dangling from a pawn shop
like a lost earring .
In the extraordinary ‘Cat and Mouse Act of the New Millennium’, through the repeated question, ‘How do I tell her’, she thinks of how she will tell her younger sister to go, remembering the fragile perfection of her at birth, ‘her whole body, / quiet as a paper cut’ – now twenty-two with her whole life ahead of her. The poems lists with terrible clarity the violence that will be visited on her if she stays. Michels herself went, moving to Ireland in 2019. The poem ‘Geography’ contrasts a typical deadly encounter between a drunk man in the States with the cops – by way of a play on the origins and meanings of that word – with the gentler way of Ireland in which here, the guards advise him to ‘Cop on’ and ‘take the footpath home’, so that the happy chaos of a daughter’s birthday the next day, experienced through a hangover, ‘this and only this / is what.takes his breath away.’
Read the full review in Poetry Ireland Review #144
