Shearsman Books




Michael Heller: Beckmann Variations and other poems

Published 15 March 2010

Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610873

Ekphrasis, that ancient mode found in Homer's 
description of Achilles's shield or Keats' 
Grecian Urn, is here transformed in Michael 
Heller's meditations in poetry and prose on work 
by the painter Max Beckmann. Heller navigates, 
sometimes with Yeats as his Virgil, through a 
gallery of Beckmann's pictures, seeing them as 
uniquely bringing home contemporary 
civilization's catastrophic impulses ("as if days 
were not for sanity"), impulses at once horrific 
and unsettling yet strangely beautiful and restorative.
Comments on Michael Heller’s recent work:
“At once grave and uplifting, Heller’s poems are 
serene meditations on time, decay, and loss that 
recover from the ruin a repletion that is also a 
recognition of our necessary incompleteness 
before the world and language.”­Patrick Pritchett in Jacket Magazine

“In a poetic generation that has frequently 
settled for small answers, his work insists upon 
the largest questions.”­Robert Zaller in Rain Taxi

“He accepts that his poetry is a fold in a great 
conversation of commentary, that linguistic 
“meeting place” in which he posits his faith. And 
it is in this belief, inspiring his practice, 
that Heller’s poetry paradoxically achieves its 
magisterial power.”­Norman Finkelstein on The Big Jewish Blog

Michael Heller is a poet, essayist and 
critic.  His most recent books are Eschaton, a 
collection of poems (Talisman, 2009), Speaking 
The Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen 
(Salt 2009), and Two Novellas: Marble Snows & The 
Study (ahadadabooks, 2009).  He is the recipient 
of many honors and grants including the 
DiCastagnola Prize of the Poetry Society of 
America, the National Endowment for the 
Humanities, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Fund for Poetry.

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Eschaton (new poems) Talisman House Publishers 
(2009) available at SPD, Greenfield Distribution 
(www.gfibooks.com), www. amazon.com and good 
bookstores. Two Novellas: Marble Snows & The 
Study (ahadada press 2009) available from SPD, 
amazon.com and from ahadadpress at 
http://www.ahadadabooks.com/content/view/162/41/. 
Speaking The Estranged: Essays on the Work of 
George Oppen (2008); Uncertain Poetries: Essays 
on Poets, Poetry and Poetics (2005) and Exigent 
Futures: New and Selected Poems (2003) available 
at www.saltpublishing.com, amazon.com and good 
bookstores. Survey of work at 
http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/heller.htm 
Collaborations with the composer Ellen Fishman 
Johnson at 
http://www.efjcomposer.com/EFJ/Collaborations.html 
Recordings at http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Heller.html