Watch (Phoenix Poets)

Description

Strasbourg The yellow and green rose, and the pink rock,The chestnuts blooming, the cobblestone square,Our Lady’s tower rising everywhere,Dark timbered fronts; the mechanical clockWhose rooster crows three times for Peter’s flock,The Apostles, the old man’s and the child’s shareOf time—aspire I’d say to make me stareAnd stop. I praise what I might otherwise mock,The locked contingencies, the stock of losses,Bright liquidity everywhere channeled,A storied cityscape of destiniesAverted as when, turning, a young Turk tossesHis hands in the air and my chest’s pummeled,“My brother, forgive me!” and my thoughts freeze.                                                                                                 In Watch, Greg Miller describes a fresh purposefulness in his life and achieves a new level of poetic thinking and composition in his writing. Artfully combining the religious and secular worldviews in his own sense of human culture, Miller complicates our understanding of all three. The poems in Watch sift layers of natural and human history across several continents, observing paintings, archeological digs, cityscapes, seascapes, landscapes—all in an attempt to envision a clear, grounded spiritual life. Employing an impressive array of traditional meters and various kinds of free verse, Miller’s poems celebrate communities both invented and real. Praise for Iron Wheel“Miller demonstrates that what Eliot said about reading a poem may be equally true of writing them: the best thing ‘is to be very, very intelligent’ and intelligence is not the same as erudition. Whether the world is made, found, or named, Miller offers an engaging portrait of things as they are.’’—David Orr, Poetry   (20090402)