March 21, 2016
In a fourth book that is as ambitious as his previous work, yet both quieter and sharper, Miller (The City, Our City) raises important questions about complicity and responsibility in a culture whose “whole structure rests/ on a sturdy foundation// of ice.” Miller often probes these personal and social issues in eerie, intimate lyrics. In “Post-elegy,” the poet comes to the chilling realization that his deceased father’s car could be “the down payment/ of some house we might live in/ for the rest of our lives.” Other poems find him adopting a more public, Whitman-esque persona, or using wry allegories to explore contemporary politics, or both. In “Hoax Bomb,” the eponymous device sits “absolute/ and silent as a poem. Images/ blew outward and everywhere.” Similarly, in “The People’s History,” Miller writes, “In the windows above the street, the People looked down/ and thought, Thank god we’re not the People/ trapped, now, in the confines of those bodies.” Variety is a virtue here: more ordinary meditations on fatherhood and marriage add texture to the book’s politics, as do formally exploratory pieces, such as the mysterious, imagistic “Landings.” As its plain yet audacious title suggests, Miller’s latest is both a development and a departure, and its best work elucidates contemporary life’s unsettling realities with an uncanny candor.
June 1, 2016
This fourth collection from Miller (after The City, Our City) is a fairly general meditation upon loss. From strained metaphors (as when a sonogram is called a "2-D cockpit" or a house's exterior "derma") to pat final lines (see "Inside the Book" and "Post-Elegy"), the work here is self-conscious. The most organic poems (i.e., those that don't rush headlong toward poeticism) are the simple ones, not overwrought but understated, as in "For Harper, 20 Months Old"--"I imagine your sleep/ as a flashlit tent" and "Through the monitor/ you come to us/ aerated/ like tapwater"--or some of the brief aphorisms in "Landings" (e.g., "It is good to remember: / butterflies/ will sip blood from an open wound"). Those are the poems that get closest to the blurb that likens Miller to Charles Simic, a likeness otherwise absent and thus a poor reference point. VERDICT Ultimately, despite comparisons, this work contains none of Simic's dark charm and humor.--Stephen Morrow, Hilliard, OH
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
March 15, 2016
In his fourth collection, Miller (The City, Our City, 2011), whose awards include a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, is witty and solemn, stoic and nimble. He favors brief lines and couplets, but his tercets and quatrains are just as lithe and whipping. Winter is the prevailing season, and Post-Elegy is a recurring title as he tracks the aftermath of a death with disarming, reverberating matter-of-factness, focusing on such details as a skim of decay inside a cup of coffee in the car owned by the deceased that was retrieved from an airport parking lot. In evocative and metaphysically crisp poems about a house on fire, a flood, the reflection of one's face in a train window, and a street protest violently suppressed, Miller maps the endlessly shifting terrain between body and soul, life and death, us and them. In incisive, jolting poems of the here-and-now, he takes measure of debt as a legacy, and the repercussions of constant mass shootings. Shrewdly pithy and nuanced, edgy and commiserating, Miller's poems are beacons: Through the trees, the campfire / made a nest of light. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)