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The Lit World: Poems
from History,
by Tim Miller
64pp
0-9798707-1-2
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Excerpt | Table of Contents
| Reviews
The Lit World
begins with God's voice just before creation, and ends with the
destruction of Europe and the last days in Hitler's bunker. The poems
between follow these two, either in their focus on atrocity and
violence—a Roman consul's mistaken campaigns in the Middle East, a
Byzantine Emperor's blinding of thousands of prisoners of war, the
drowning and execution of citizens and clergy during the French
Revolution, and the many wars against Native Americans in the West; or
in looking to a more contemplative and peaceful life, with monologues
from Siberian and Australian shamans, Catholic saints, and a Hindu
priest who easily dismisses Alexander the Great's invitation to take him
on his campaigns.
There are also voices between these, from Walt Whitman looking back on
his years away from New York before the Civil War, to Hart Crane's
highest moment atop a Catholic church in Mexico, celebrating an Aztec
festival; from the Roman Cato of Utica, a suicide, surprised to find
himself at the base of Dante's Mount Purgatory, to a sequence of poems
from prehistory, imagining the world's first artists and priests
painting in the caves of France and Spain amid music and ritual.
Reviews
From Poet, Michael S. Begnal. Originally posted on his blog
here.
Tim Miller’s poetry collection
The Lit World
(S4N Books, 2008) is a
compact little book (52 pages), concise and honed.
Subtitled “Poems from History,” it intends to inhabit the minds of
numerous personages throughout time, and succeeds nicely.
Beginning with the Hebrew creation myth, and including other
Biblical tales (thus making “Poems from History” something of a
misnomer, perhaps), Miller’s accomplished prose-poetry ranges across
vast swathes of time.
An intriguing early poem here is “Beginning to Paint,” which references
the date 18,000-11,000 BC. The ritualistic nature of
early cave painting is explored: “as my fingers move, more of him
appears: hooves: horns: full body & dark nose—& all smelling of juniper
& sweating walls & unforgettable song.” Miller also
mentions flutes, the subject of “On Making Flutes (40,000-28,000 BC)”
(appropriately enough), thus creating a nice intertextual symmetry.
To my mind, one of the best pieces of the collection is “Those in the
Jebel Sahaba Cemetery (10,000 BC),” which is also printed on the book’s
back cover. It describes the victims of a
12,000-year-old battle, and insightfully intuits the mindset of those
people who buried their dead “in pits with slabs overtop to protect
them.” Miller continues, “& you find us all on our
left sides: our heads facing south: our hands in front of our faces—you
find us all arranged, arrayed, observed.” The slant
rhyme of “arranged, arrayed” lends a musical quality to the conclusion,
which seems to accord somehow with the reverence imparted to the ancient
people with whom the poem engages.
“Trajan’s Bridge (c. 105)” is interesting on a couple of different
levels. For one, it is actually written from the
point of view of the bridge itself, an inanimate object.
Also it addresses the reader, creating a kind of sudden
postmodern awareness of this book as book: “I am only two stadiums long
yet my length extends to your reading eyes.” The tone
is accusatory, indicting the putative reader as shallow, concerned with
commerce and transitory pleasures. It ends, “Even the
Dacians knew of more than their senses. Consider
them, or yourselves—you who are more submerged than me.”
The reader of course is invited to see him- or herself here to
one degree or another, or may also decline said invitation altogether.
Many of the poems in The Lit World are a comment on
genocide and oppression, as for example “The Bulgarian Town of Batak
(April, 1876)” deals with one of the various genocides committed but
denied by the Turks. “Tecumseh (1811)” delineates a
particular response to the genocide committed by the American government
against American Indians, while, conversely, “William Tecumseh Sherman
(October, 1868)” seeks to explore the viewpoint of a perpetrator.
The collection ends with a sequence set in Hitler’s bunker, 1945.
So, though Miller’s assessment of human history is ultimately a
bleak and at times off-putting one, his poetry itself is absorbingly
well-wrought, stripped and direct.
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