Synopses & Reviews
The narrators in this mesmerizing collection often desire to hold time still in moments of love, yes, but also when feeling fully located in a particular place or experience. Yet they also acknowledge that to hold time still would mean the death of love, the death of experience. Thus, the grounding and locating sensory images that surround us and the eye that apprehends them become greatly important. At the heart of the book is What Night Says to the Empty Boat,” a sequence of lyric poems in which the three main characters Justine, Clarence, and Andy drift to and from, together and apart, viewed through the dispassionate lens of the unspoken fourth main character. An artistic and philosophical endeavor to place oneself in the world, this stunning collection is a wholehearted embrace of being, where technique and subject come together in a remarkable combination of personal lyric and formal innovation.
Review
"Wayne Miller's poetry is entranced, luminous, supernaturally poised. He drifts through a world that is twilit, looming, strangely stilled, and somehow in need of his care, as if he had stayed up till some record late hour to watch over dreamers and scenes disarmed by sleep, a sad, fond ghost coaxing them to "surface into themselves." He is the purest kind of lyric poet, neither narrating nor explaining but saying over and over their beauty and poignance and power."
James Richardson, author of Vectors and Interglacial
“These poems are not about the world. Rather, they are the world put into words. The outside world is visible in and through these poems, which are thrilling in their metaphysical questioning and deeply satisfying in their perceptions. I cant resist lying down in the snowprint these poems make. Millers language is irresistably sensual. Lush, lavish and achingly accurate, Millers words have an almost corporeal realness to thema kiss that becomes an object pressed between lovers, a ‘room that will be the ghost of right now/ for as long as we carry it.” I was transfixed by this book.
Rachel Zucker, author of Eating in the Underworld
Review
In his second collection, Miller quietly disassembles everyday life, identifying the rhetoric, folly, expectation, and artifice that make up the world. Light is an important featurea light on a film set, a cars headlights, the flash-veins of lightningas it helps the poet notice tiny actions and the monumental changes they inspire. An artist, for example, bites into her still-lifes apple, choosing to destroy the rooms echo / of the canvas and calling into question the accuracy of the space. Like his characters, Miller makes a vast impact using the smallest strokehe is careful and suspenseful, wary of flamboyance. In a series of poems that emulate a screenplay, props like disembodied / buttons, a collapsed preschool- / quality mobile, empty test tubes pile up without obvious meaning. Readers in search of ready-made epiphanies are not welcome here.
The New Yorker"Transformationsfrom the everyday to the wondrous and/ or hauntingare everywhere in Millers elegant second book. The poems are at once dreamlike and fervent in their will to cleave to the material world. Sleep gives the body back its mouth,” writes Miller in one poem. Elsewhere, the shouts of a beaten man become flashbulbs/ striking the river,” and a lightning storm becomes a meditation on loss and clarity. In the title poem, everyday objectsa hammer, glasses, a cup, a matchbooktake on mythic significance, as if they had souls of their own, and a lovers kiss becomes another object pressed/ between them.” Miller (Only the Senses Sleep) mixes what is with what we perceive and what could be without explanation or commentary. A series of poems labeled notes for a film in verse” continue Millers exploration of the intersection of observation and artifice, this time through whimsical charactersa tightrope walker hiking telephone wires across the country, a pair of distant, angels talking to scarecrows, a girl fascinated by cement trucks, a drawbridge operator in a bar. Miller remains a poet to watch, and one who strives to ”separate/ the seeing from whats seen.”
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Wayne Miller's poetry is entranced, luminous, supernaturally poised. He drifts through a world that is twilit, looming, strangely stilled, and somehow in need of his care, as if he had stayed up till some record late hour to watch over dreamers and scenes disarmed by sleep, a sad, fond ghost coaxing them to "surface into themselves." He is the purest kind of lyric poet, neither narrating nor explaining but saying over and over their beauty and poignance and power."
James Richardson, author of Vectors and Interglacial
These poems are not about the world. Rather, they are the world put into words. The outside world is visible in and through these poems, which are thrilling in their metaphysical questioning and deeply satisfying in their perceptions. I cant resist lying down in the snowprint these poems make. Millers language is irresistably sensual. Lush, lavish and achingly accurate, Millers words have an almost corporeal realness to thema kiss that becomes an object pressed between lovers, a room that will be the ghost of right now/ for as long as we carry it.” I was transfixed by this book.
Rachel Zucker, author of Eating in the Underworld
Best New Book of Poetry, Best Short Poem in a Collection, Best Final Poem in a Collection, and Best Opening Lines in a Collection”
Coldfront (2009 Year in Review)
Synopsis
Elegant, learned, sensual, The Book of Props offers mesmerizing images of the scrim of the world, capturing both representation and inspiration.
Mediating claims between the attention objects demand of us and the effects of perception on time, these poems diagram the shifting geometries of human relationships. A tightrope walker who travels on telephone wires; angels, scarecrows, friends, and lovers--the speakers in The Book of Props often desire to hold time still, even as they acknowledge that to do so would actually mean the death of love, of experience. These poems--including a series presented in an innovative film script format--constitute an imaginative yet authentic inquiry into the varied constructs in which we define love.
Inventive and engaging, The Book of Props is a poetic and philosophical endeavor to place oneself in the world.
Synopsis
Elegant, learned, sensual, The Book of Props offers images of the scrim of the world, capturing both representation and inspiration. Mediating claims between the attention objects demand of us and the effects of perception on time, these poems diagram the shifting geometries of human relationships. A tightrope walker who travels on telephone wires, angels, scarecrows, friends, and lovers abound, along with a triangle presented in an innovative film script format, resulting in an imaginative yet authentic inquiry into the varied constructs in which we define love. Inventive and engaging, this anticipated second volume by Wayne Miller is a poetic and philosophical endeavor to place oneself in the world.