The Milk Hours: Poems

by John James Narrated by John James

Overview

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Milk Hours is an elegant debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss.

“We lived overlooking the walls overlooking the cemetery.” So begins the title poem of this collection, whose recursive temporality is filled with living, grieving things, punctuated by an unseen world of roots, bodies, and concealed histories. Like a cemetery, too, The Milk Hours sets unlikely neighbors alongside each other: Hegel and Murakami, Melville and the Persian astronomer al-Sufi, enacting a transhistorical poetics even as it brims with intimacy. These are poems of frequent swerves and transformations, which never stray far from an engagement with science, geography, art, and aesthetics, nor from the dream logic that motivates their incessant investigations.

Indeed, while John James begins with the biographical-the haunting loss of a father in childhood, the exhausted hours of early fatherhood-the questions that emerge from his poetic synthesis are both timely and universal: what is it to be human in an era where nature and culture have fused? To live in a time of political and environmental upheaval, of both personal and public loss? How do we make meaning, and to whom-or what-do we turn, when such boundaries so radically collapse?

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

05/20/2019

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, James’s debut calls attention to the beauty in history’s myriad upheavals. His view encompasses literature, art, and philosophy, reflecting on (as well as giving meaning to) the circumstances of their making: “The dream kept urging me on to do/ what I was doing—/ to make music— since philosophy,/ in my view, is the greatest music,” the speaker confesses early in the collection. Presented as a series of linked lyric pieces, the poems in this luminous volume shift effortlessly between lexicons and registers. He writes, for instance: “History—the branch/ of knowledge dealing with past events; a continuous,/ systematic narrative of; aggregate deeds; acts, ideas, events/ that will shape the course of the future; immediate/ but significant happenings; finished, done with—‘he’s history.’ ” Oscillating between the objective language of definition and more colloquial diction, this passage exemplifies both a strength and potential weakness of the book. One of the dangers of engaging history as an artistic subject is that it can invite exposition at the expense of creating tension within the poetic line. But while phrases such as “the branch/ of knowledge dealing with past events...” might fail to stir the reader, James’s skillful craftsmanship makes this a memorable debut. (June)

From the Publisher

Praise for The Milk Hours

“Ruminative and tender as the collection’s title suggests . . . These poems care deeply, and they give the reader the language to do so.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

 “Mysterious, ethereal . . . [James’s poems] retain this feeling: souls rooted in the ground.”—The Millions

 “James is a poet of staggering lyricism, intricate without ever obscuring his intent. Quite simply, The Milk Hours announces the arrival of a great new talent in American poetry.”—Shelf Awareness

 “The poems in this luminous volume shift effortlessly between lexicons and registers . . . James’s skillful craftsmanship makes this a memorable debut.”—Publishers Weekly

 “‘Home is a question,’ writes James in The Milk Hours, a remarkable debut in which sorrow leads to an astonishing intimacy with the world. The speaker is pensive but inquisitive, bewildered by the loss of a father and renewed by love and parenthood. Art, science, and travel, like mortality, become tethers to the elegant and chaotic truths of our world. The Milk Hours is a moving and urgently crafted testament to resilience and to beauty.”—Eduardo C. Corral

 “The titular poem in James’s debut collection refers not only to the luminous hour of infant nurture, although that is its occasion, but to the violent loss of his father, an event distant enough that ‘snowmelt smoothes the stone cuts of his name.’ James’s searing attention is upon the fleeting, the untethered, upon fecundity and decay, the cosmic and the molecular. These are also the poems of a young father’s daily life in the wane of empire, who wishes ‘to remember things purely, to see them / As they are,’ and who recognizes in what he sees our peril. ‘The end,’ he writes, ‘we’re moving toward it.’ James is, then, a poet of our precarious moment, and The Milk Hours is his gift to us.”—Carolyn Forché

 “I can’t remember a collection of poems with a greater variety of trees in it than The Milk Hours, or one that has left me so conscious of the centrality of the tree to human history, or for that matter, to humanness itself—from the microscopic branches of our nerve endings to the vast tentacular dust lanes of the galaxy we live in. Impeccably constructed, profoundly felt, and every bit as gorgeous as it is full of powerful observation (a candlewick’s ‘braided cotton converting to ember,’ dead stars that throw ‘cold light through the black matter / of millennia’), The Milk Hours is a startlingly mature, exhilarating debut, and one whose urgent evocation of the past and confident reaching for what lies ahead ensure it a prominent place in our present.”—Timothy Donnelly

 “The poetry of the earth is intensely alive in the poems of John James. In this luminous first book, there are poems of a son and a young father. Many of the best inhabit a tormented Kentucky landscape where there is a field with horses, a house and a barn, a flooding river, a cemetery where a parent lies, and bees or flies hovering. Out of the sorrowful fragments of personal history, John James has a created a book of unusual intelligence and beauty.”—Henri Cole

 Praise for John James

“James does as that first singer did, Caedmon, who sang because he was told he must do so—a song of praise, of animals and life, of land and blood and time. Such work is wholly personal and completely anonymous, embedded in the very life and limb whose limits it also astonishingly resists.”—Dan Beachy-Quick

“An unflinching observer, James writes with a patient honesty and a lyric beauty that will leave you ringing.”—Ada Limón

“James’s poems dig deep as he asks us to join him at the edge of his excavations, to see what he’s unearthed, and we can’t help but look until we see it too.”—Portland Book Review

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178021149
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	03/28/2023
Series:	Max Ritvo Poetry Prize
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The Milk Hours
for J.E.J., 1962-1993
and C.S.M.J., 2013-

We lived overlooking the walls overlooking the cemetery.
The cemetery is where my father remains. We walked in the garden for what seemed like an hour but in reality must have been days. Cattail, heartseed—these words mean nothing to me.
The room opens up into white and more white, sun outside between steeples. I remember, now, the milk hours, leaning over my daughter’s crib, dropping her ten, twelve pounds into the limp arms of her mother. The suckling sound as I crashed into sleep. My daughter, my father—his son. The wet grass dew-speckled above him. His face grows vague and then vaguer.
From our porch I watch snow fall on bare firs. Why does it matter now—what gun, what type. Bluesmoke rises. The chopped copses glisten. Snowmelt smoothes the stone cuts of his name.

***

April, Andromeda

I am in this world, not self, not seed, not stamen-dusted pistil flicking in the wind—the eye sees past its limitations.
Crushed petals in the dirt, I’m courting a horse with an apple,
watching its white tail swish along the fence. Somewhere,
the galaxy spins. I smile at the cloudless sky.
—
Continuum of frequencies, Ptolemy’s
Almagest, the star charts called it Little Cloud—
chained constellations in The Book of Fixed Stars. Nova for new, cut fish for never. A heart held back for the knife.
—
The opening of large tracts by the icecutters commonly causes a pond to break up earlier; for the water agitated by the wind even in cold weather wears away the surrounding ice.
—
This morning I walked past rows of jeweled honeysuckle twining through the square links in an aluminum fence.
They glistened in the sun,
as they always do. You could say their vines shuddered.
—
Photographed by Isaac
Roberts, 1887, again in 1899, the galaxy, the ruler of man, the pearling spiral takes its name from the area of sky in which it appears.
Sussex, England, retrograde motion.
The daughter chained to a rock.
—
We forget rapidly what should be forgotten. The universal sense of fables and anecdotes is marked by our tendency to forget name and date and geography. “How in the right are children to forget name and date and place.”
—
Pained loveliness—the sonnet sweet fetter’d. Morning, still, couched in narrative—carrots taken from my palm. Horse nose,
its silken touch, teeth against the skin.
The eye sees the mind sees crushed pedals in the pestle.
All parts are binding.
—
Constellations—huge man wearing a crown,
upside down with respect to the eclipse. The smaller figure next to him sitting on a chair. A whale somewhere beneath it.
—
By ear industrious—attention met—misers of sound and syllable. See kale, see rows of collard stalks—think
Cassiopeia. Think arrogant and vain. Greek models, sea monster Cetus, the errant study of.
—
I shall ere long paint to you—as one can without canvas—the true form of the whale—
my parts are all binding—
as he actually appears to the eye—
I wonder, now, how Ovid did it—I pass that matter by.

***

Driving Arizona

Saguaro in headlights, we touch like foreign bodies.
Sedona recedes against the sky’s aperture.
Roll the covers off, the coldness in Williams—
Aren’t you afraid? I’m afraid, too.
Wanting to know you, thinking I do,
Thinking of the miles unfolding before us,
The highway beating through rows of golden cacti.
I want to remember things purely, to see them
As they are without the urge to order.
To take the pictures down, and say what hurts.
Say we’re able to enjoy this more than we ever did.
Somewhere behind us, the mountains slope off.
Sunrise breaks over fields of whitened heather.
Let’s only sit and listen. Only stare at the open earth
Without saying why. If approximations are the best
We can do—fine then, let’s approximate.
Home is a question and we’re drifting from it.

***

Chthonic

My light bulb is gone.
It was dying anyways.
The room goes dark before I sleep. I lie eyes closed, listening,
hoping the radio waves cause only one type of sick. My bed’s not safe. The feathers in my pillow came from a factory in Beijing.
Their birds fly east in the shape of a V.
On the edge where my mother sat reading a bright picture book something has taken her place. My father’s mouth, which I lost years ago, speaks from a jar on the shelf.
I ask my mother what she did with the light.
She says it’s under the bed. I ask my father why he can’t hear. He tells me he’s underground.

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