In a tentative bid for permission “If not I, Who?” Joan Michelson begins her impressive collection. “… I assume my right / to cross the border of your voice.”... In this scrupulous way she enters into the traumas caused by the major displacements of recent history: from the Holocaust to the present day. Situations of enforced exile and alienation keep her alive to the tragic, at the same time, the tone of her writing is always pulling away towards the unsentimental and the laconic. She is a skilled storyteller with an acute sense of identification with the plight of others. Landing Stage is a perfect balance of the specific with the intensely imagined.

       - Martha Kapos | Author of The Likeness and My Nights in Cupid’s Palace

Michelson reveals shockingly unexpected ways of dealing with appalling experiences and betrayals: a wish to unsay the very worst can even lead to a perpetrator being described as ‘half an angel’.  Michelson’s eloquent sympathies extend to traumatised soldiers and their bewildered attempts to return to a civilian life...

      - Mike Batholomew-Biggs, | Author of Fred & Blossom and Tradesman’s Exit

These are poems of displacement voiced by displaced folk: people who have lost home, members of their family, limbs and identity. There is sentiment without sentimentality, and the ostensible unemotional texture centring on factuality is intensified via its distancing. The epigrammatic poems of Reportage read as if written in a bemused daze, the folk possessed by bewilderment in coming to terms with isolation and hardship. What helps to convey this is the skillful capturing of the speech rhythms of adopted English which in turn echoes the dilemma of communicating across cultures. The detached tone, the fragmentary and epigrammatic structures, and freely-associative imagery make for a moving, heart-searing read. 

       - Roger Elkin | Author of Marking Time  and  Blood Brothers.