Description:
Compressed, knotty poems of intimacy and grief
Greg Miller's best book yet, Green Runs Through It moves against the contemporary American grain. Compressed, knotty, and direct, the poems invoke friendship, family, history, and intimacy's many forms. Grief registers love strong as death. Poems defy boundaries between life and death, the clear and the inexplicable. Narratives, meditations, dream visions, and lyric songs confront the frailties of the body and mind, his voice finding solace in the natural world and a felt interconnectedness between human beings. Memory challenges and is challenged while embracing a confounding totality.
[Sample Poem]
An Illness in Old Age
Concerned about worrying about her
ruminating about his health concerns,
he keeps them to himself, which worries her
with everything she fears he will not say,
but this, he reasons, leaves them at least free
from her hooks sunk in his reality,
chasing and thrashing, thrashing and chasing it,
her great white whale; she's Ahab to his wounds.
They love each other, tethered to their tales,
the deeps each keeps, shared silences their sails.
Review Quotes:
"Miller lets us into the guileless movements of his mind and feelings with a directness that is very, very rare today. There is art in his work but little artifice. I find myself believing him utterly, and feeling gratitude for his steadfast dedication to his modest yet enormous project."--Jonathan Galassi
"I particularly like Greg Miller's combination of the awkward and unfinished in feeling and tone with the 'finish' of his language and versification. It's a difficult balance to achieve, but he manages it magnificently."--Thom Gunn
"In Miller's poems, redemption has more to do with a truthful accounting of the world than with transcending it into a sacred reality...His gifts are always in the service of the large, important issues that his poems treat. He's one of the best poets in his generation."--Tom Sleigh
"In these dramatic, exultant, and luxuriously precise poems, Greg Miller leads us to see the invisible, the fleeting, the indelible past with family and strangers, the body locked in pain and desire, the redemptive power of nature."--Emily Fragos
"His work is a remarkable achievement full of multi-traditional, beautiful, truthful knowledge and his own newly discovered wisdom. Miller's poetry is formal and free, a life preserver that will save the reader from drowning in an ocean of hatred and lies that covers two thirds of the world these days."--Stanley Moss