Into This World

Michael Miller's poems are finely tuned meditations on war, nature, friends, and love. The cycles of light and darkness, of fear and hope, of life and death echo from poem to poem. One realizes reading these poems that one must climb to get to the light, that certainty is uncertain. For "Corporal Sayers," "The war is over, / The dead will not run across a ridgeline, / And he has returned, / Refusing to kill a spider." And the spider survives to appear in another poem, "Cracks:" "My black coffee is cooling down, / Early light falls through the window / Where I sit beside the spider / Crawling out of cracks in the house. / I let it live." Even love must be earned, not something we can take for granted. In "Rose," "A drift of beauty / Will fall with each petal / As permanence eludes us." These are poems that can be read almost effortlessly yet offer new rewards with each reading. "I read Michael Miller's poems with great pleasure in their accurate seeing, their assured phrasing, their true and proportionate feeling."-Richard Wilbur "No other poet I know writes so beautifully about seasoned love-love within the context of a life-long marriage. In writing about people and the places they share, Michael Miller achieves in his poems a deep sense of emotional integrity. His poems value clarity, understatement, love in the context of its turbulence, and the accuracy of each detail."-Stephen Haven