Wherever You Lay Your Head

by Jane Miller

Overview

In this, her seventh collection of poems, Miller redefines poetry to accomodate a richly complex lyric style. Intelligent, lush, and visionary, her poems have been compared as the poetic equivalents of the paintings of Jackson Pollack or Jasper Johns. Miller's poetry is ultra modern, mixing elements of pop culture with high art, sexuality with intellectual investigation, complexity with brilliant lucidity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619320512
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	12/11/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	114
File size:	454 KB

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 University of 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