The City, Our City

The city where Miller’s third book takes place is decidedly modern: it has movie theaters and “I-beams,” airplanes and streetlights—“the City is a bloom/ of light in the nation’s night-/ black veil.” At the same time it is vexed by some ancient concerns: it is, perhaps has long been, a city at war, with a “Royal Cathedral” and a history that requires a preindustrial brand of English (“Mister Preacher// marke the doores with crosses”). The collection takes its unity from 14 poems with Roman numerals instead of titles, each of them “endlessly musing// the backstreets and boulevards” in order to make of the city a streamlined sketch or model for contemporary American life. Poem X remembers when “Tanks ripped away cornerstones// in the Gothic District, cinemas/ showed footage of whatever// was happening outside.” It is a post-9/11, post-imperial, unjust city, one that tries to get past persistent fears, to find a space for private life, while “sirens choke back their warnings,” and silence “curls inside the shell that refused to explode.” Miller (The Book of Props), also the co-editor of the widely read literary journal Pleiades, also mixes in poems—such as “American Aubade”—which do not use the backdrop of his city at all; some of them are his best work, acquiring (in place of historical sweep) a quirky, small-scale wisdom at which Miller excels: “folks keep lying down/ inside their parents’ fears—// and what of it? This is/ what they want.” (Oct.)