Watch

Overview

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 clock

Whose rooster crows three times for Peter's flock,

The Apostles, the old man's and the child's share

Of time--aspire I'd say to make me stare

And stop. I praise what I might otherwise mock,

The locked contingencies, the stock of losses,

Bright liquidity everywhere channeled,

A storied cityscape of destinies

Averted as when, turning, a young Turk tosses

His 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.

Editorial Reviews

In his fourth collection (following Mississippi Sudan), Miller explores the shared terrain of the spiritual and the quotidian through carefully wrought poems that also reveal a great depth of emotional intelligence. The author clearly has an affinity for poetry that has come to be called metaphysical-a noted literary critic, he recently published George Herbert's "Holy Patterns"-but he wears his scholarship lightly. The movement from biological to iconographical families enriches poems that address both realms of feeling. A poem called "River," a closely observed narrative that depicts a father's final days from a son's perspective, offers these evocative lines: "I kneel by my father's stapled body./ He suctions thick liquid from his lungs. He coughs to clear them; it hurts. He wants more air. He wants/ To live, the heart's valve's parachutes/ Opening with oxygen to feed/ the body's healing." Miller breaks the stanza between the parachutes and their opening, so that the poem, like the body, rests briefly before lifting itself-and the reader-up from the page. Verdict For all readers of poetry, not just those who can appreciate the references to Herbert and Donne.-Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.

Author Information

Bio of Greg Miller

Greg Miller is professor of English at Millsaps College. He is the author of Rib Cage and Iron Wheel, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

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Additional Info

Imprint

University of Chicago Press

Filesize

1.10 MB

Number of Pages

88

eBook ISBN

9780226526157