Phoenix Poets
3 total works
Strasbourg The yellow and green rose, and the pink rock, The chestnuts blooming, the cobblestone square, Our Lady's tower rising everywhere, Dark timbered fronts; the mechanical clock Whose rooster crows three times for Peter's flock, The Apostles, the old man's and the child's share Of time - aspire I'd say to make me stare And stop. I praise what I might otherwise mock, The locked contingencies, the stock of losses, Bright liquidity everywhere channeled, A storied cityscape of destinies Averted as when, turning, a young Turk tosses His hands in the air and my chest's pummeled, "My brother, forgive me!" and my thoughts freeze. In "Watch", Greg Miller describes a fresh purposefulness in his life and achieves a new level of poetic thinking and composition in his writing. Artfully combining the religious and secular worldviews in his own sense of human culture, Miller complicates our understanding of all three. The poems in "Watch" sift layers of natural and human history across several continents, observing paintings, archaeological digs, cityscapes, seascapes, landscapes - all in an attempt to envision a clear, grounded spiritual life.
Employing an impressive array of traditional meters and various kinds of free verse, Miller's poems celebrate communities both invented and real.
Employing an impressive array of traditional meters and various kinds of free verse, Miller's poems celebrate communities both invented and real.
Under the sway of the indelible storytelling culture of the South, Greg Miller has crafted poems from all that he hears and sees around him. Written in a language rarely heard in modern devotion, the poems in Rib Cage show old communities disintegrating, extended families dispersing, and people in economic or personal distress struggling for dignity and a clear sense of their predicaments. From plain speech to evocative lyricism, from free verse to hymnlike eloquence, Miller deftly gives a voice and a history to the places he creates, places that, in the end, expand to encompass all of humanity.
The poems in Iron Wheel are hard won, the product of the clash of cultures: Southern, religious, gay. Miller achieves an intense, disturbing, and singular poetic voice, capable of tenderness, but undaunted when forced to confront the harsh, often violent realities of contemporary life in the South.