MICHAEL SCHMIDT was born and raised in Mexico and studied at Harvard and Oxford. He is the founder and director of Carcanet Press and editor of PN Review in the United Kingdom. In 2006, he was honored by the Order of the British Empire for his services to poetry. Schmidt’s Selected Poems received a PBS Special Commendation; his New and Collected Poems was published by Sheep Meadow Press (2010).
 

“Vibrant, radiant, Michael Schmidt’s poetry is steeped in modernist tradition (Yeats and Eliot) and questingly new. The result is a passionate discourse that is at once earthy and numinous, from which ‘flows that unusual grace which is rooted in muscle, / Which comes from the marrow and lymph, which is divine.'"—John Ashbery

“Michael Schmidt proves once again that he is first and foremost a poet of stature and breadth. The Resurrection of the Body is a magisterial book, whose reader is riveted to the page by urgent narrative while (like the pilgrim entering the Golden Dome whose creation and destruction form one such narrative) marveling at and savoring the linguistic density, perfection of form and figure, of the poetry.”—Marilyn Hacker

“The Stories of My Life houses a chapel of mysterious devotional poetry. Michael Schmidt's passion is lighted rather than told—then told, in poetry where he joins in lyric dialogue with the great churchmen poets' Further, in this book, he is in dialogue with what he reads, ‘exchanges confidence in blood, / telltale and intimate, profane, ’ loving jousts with many of the world's great poets, novelists, and thinkers, ancient and modern: Greeks, Pound's pals, old English, old American, etc., and he writes brilliant ‘afters’ and ‘froms,’ he makes it new—we are in St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Ávila, and C.H. Sisson country. Born in Mexico, Schmidt rides an invisible Rocinante through his adventures, which include chivalrous roadside and bedside encounters. The reader tags along happily on a donkey, in front, beside, and behind Don Michael.”—Stanley Moss