Caesura an online journal of the literature and the arts has published an extensive feature on the work of Michael Heller in their “Skald” series. The feature has an introduction to Michael Heller’s work by Norman Finkelstein.
“Michael Heller’s long poetic career can be understood as a sustained investigation into the substance of being, a quest to uncover what he ultimately senses to be hidden. He is a scientist of the spirit, a deeply learned philosophical poet who has demonstrated a lifelong suspicion of philosophy. A lyric poet who can reach ecstatically toward the starry heights via his studies of Buddhism and Kabbalah, he is also a dedicated craftsman whose insistence on verbal precision is derived from his close connections to the Objectivists and their empirically based belief that poems are constructed out of a commonly shared language. The intellectual urgency of his writing is balanced by its meditative calm. Thinking about his first encounter with the poetry of his mentor George Oppen, he observes ‘how little words counted against the strange unknowableness of the world. How everything of true depth to the individual struck me as being unnamed, and thereby unsayable even as its shadow in the form of desire swept across one.’ And again: ‘If I understand Oppen correctly, the poet is caught between a philosophical sense of his or her craft and a religious sense of the mysteriousness of the world.'”
