Wherever You Lay Your Head

by Jane Miller

Overview

Daring new poems by a critically acclaimed, brilliant younger poet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556591280
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	04/01/1999
Pages:	114
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Jane Miller is the author of eight previous books of poetry and essays. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award. She lives in Tucson and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at The Universityof Arizona, having served as the program's director 1999-2003.

What People are Saying About This

Jorie Graham

Jane Miller is an extraordinary poet . . . an astoundingly supple voice.

Editorial Reviews

An unapologetic Japanophile, Miller (Univ. of Arizona) follows up her new and selected volume of 1996 (Memory at These Speeds) with these Asian-style poems: imagistic with a deliberately unfinished quality. Motivated by deep guilt over the atom bomb and her "secret / sin of commission," Miller in poem after poem juxtaposes scenes inspired by the 19th-century artist Hiroshige with images of nuclear disaster. Hers is an endless dialectic of innocent victims and evil bomb-makers. In "Site Y," she follows the course of the fireball ("the rest is history"); in "Firewatcher," a ten-year-old watches for fires on the day before the bomb; Edward Teller, in another poem, doesn't worry his conscience one bit; elsewhere, the speaker imagines the bomb from below, and a "hundred thousand fall in the city like blossoms along a riverbank." Miller continues to worry about nuclear power and waste: "Views of Edo" moves from a panorama of the American nuclear-blasted landscape, teeming with radioactivity, to Hiroshige's golden view of Edo. Nuclear accidents, nuclear cover-ups, nuclear "garbage," and we still zap dogs for scientific research ("The Voiceless Beagles of Davis"). Miller's at her best in the pre-nuclear world of the artist, "a world not quite of this world" that she re-creates in two sections of "Stations." These short poems record images from Hiroshige's engravings on the actual way-stations along the pilgrimage from Kyoto to present-day Tokyo. It's a dreamy vision of colors and paper lanterns, temple gates, apricot trees, and pilgrims from all walks of life. Miller's passive-aggressive poems about the Bomb begin to grow tiresome, thereby coming to trivialize the very subject she mostcares about, along with all things Japanese.

Kirkus Reviews