xterminal's review
4.0
Leslie Adrienne Miller, Eat Quite Everything You See (Graywolf Press, 2002)
It has been far too long since I read this excellent little book, my second outing in Miller's territory (cf. The Resurrection Trade review November 2007 ish), without my saying anything about it. As is sometimes the case with books of poetry that wow me, I just haven't been able to think of anything to say that's going to sell you this book better than Miller's own words.
“...I'm sure she couldn't
decide where she'd work, returned to the garden,
though it was too wet, the lemons not really in season,
and the backs of her books bled against the wood
of the table where the trees had wept all night.
Instead of work, she found herself listening to my heart's
petty flutter and stall in a cold house with a thin view
of a peevish American river, found herself retracting
the way we had both charted the alarming assembly
of crows filling the banks of the elms...”
(--”Cartography with Crows”)
I mean, how can you read a passage like that and not want the rest of the poem, or the book whence it came? Miller's images and word choice are solid as they come, and when she is unable to stop herself using value-judgment words, my god, “peevish”. Delightful. Back in the day when I was a regular Poet's Market reader, there was a listing—I can never remember for what magazine—that divided poetry into two camps, the ashcan and the academic. (Think Bukowski and Robert Hass as epitomies of same, as a quick comparison.) It's not quite that simple; Miller's work strikes me as the kind of thing the academics would sing in the middle of a three-day bender in the kind of bar where the windows are too grimy to see in, and that is a wonderful thing indeed. If you haven't discovered Leslie Adrienne Miller, do not hesitate to begin now. ****
It has been far too long since I read this excellent little book, my second outing in Miller's territory (cf. The Resurrection Trade review November 2007 ish), without my saying anything about it. As is sometimes the case with books of poetry that wow me, I just haven't been able to think of anything to say that's going to sell you this book better than Miller's own words.
“...I'm sure she couldn't
decide where she'd work, returned to the garden,
though it was too wet, the lemons not really in season,
and the backs of her books bled against the wood
of the table where the trees had wept all night.
Instead of work, she found herself listening to my heart's
petty flutter and stall in a cold house with a thin view
of a peevish American river, found herself retracting
the way we had both charted the alarming assembly
of crows filling the banks of the elms...”
(--”Cartography with Crows”)
I mean, how can you read a passage like that and not want the rest of the poem, or the book whence it came? Miller's images and word choice are solid as they come, and when she is unable to stop herself using value-judgment words, my god, “peevish”. Delightful. Back in the day when I was a regular Poet's Market reader, there was a listing—I can never remember for what magazine—that divided poetry into two camps, the ashcan and the academic. (Think Bukowski and Robert Hass as epitomies of same, as a quick comparison.) It's not quite that simple; Miller's work strikes me as the kind of thing the academics would sing in the middle of a three-day bender in the kind of bar where the windows are too grimy to see in, and that is a wonderful thing indeed. If you haven't discovered Leslie Adrienne Miller, do not hesitate to begin now. ****
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