ENTERING THE DAY: POEMS BY MICHAEL MILLER. (Pinyon Publishing).

BACK TO BLOGGING BOOK REVIEWS…

Wars leave scars in the minds of those who serve in any military conflict, and survivors often share their experiences through journaling, drawing, writing poetry, and novels. In Michael Miller’s case, he records glimpses of several wars through his own experience and the engagements of his relatives in military conflict. Although he reflects on other experiences “entering the day,” his accounts of servicemen during several wars are the most arresting poems in this volume. 

In “A Different Time,” Miller reflects on the experience of  a Marine who landed on Okinawa during World War II during his walk across a meadow in Massachusetts, “far from the black sand of that island/Where he left his blood;/His Purple Heart remain[ing] in/the glove compartment of His Buick beside his pistol,…” this poem followed by  “Tide of Blood,” a powerful salute to those whose “lives deprived /Of their future, the letters/He was asked to mail, ‘In case,’/And with each whiskey and cigarette/Another comrade appears, his face/Still innocent across the table.” Although Miller, of course, did not serve in this conflict, he recounts the experience as if he had served alongside the narrator in a convincing unsentimental portrait of a WWII survivor.

Miller’s own experiences in war are encapsulated in Section V, Verse VII, a powerful retrospective poem familiar to many veterans of the Vietnam conflict: “Only once did we visit/The wall, move our fingers/Over the chiseled names,/The Marines we knew./Flowers, photographs,/Letters and crayon drawings/Rested before the wall./No one walked away with/Their head held high.” This poem invoked a poignant memory of an encounter with a Vietnam veteran when I attended The Sixth Day course in upper state New York. A survivor of the Vietnam War stood up among 300 participants at this event where we had been “processing” experiences all night, and as the sun came up, he confessed that he was deeply hurt because he had been maligned as a veteran of that conflict and never properly thanked for his service. The moderator told him to stand up and declared, “In the name of the president of the United States and all U.S. citizens, we thank you for your service and remember all who served in this conflict.” Two weeks later, after we had returned home, we read about the wall going up, and I’ve always believed we had something to do with this commemoration.

Miller does not leave readers suspended with dark reflections and redeems his experiences with a more hopeful poem entitled “On Nauset Beach,” where “beyond [his] limitations of old age…” “he strides through the surprise/Of an unswept morning/On a shoulder of Nauset Beach/Singing to the Atlantic,/The thrashing incoming tide,/the waves breaking onto the shore/Like sleeves of ruffled lace,/The gannets swooping/With black-tipped wings/Beating a welcome…” Here is Miller at his lyrical best, counteracting the darkness of war and old age with his insightful voice and an undaunted heart.

This poet is not without humor and is capable of a comfortable irony in “Morning Song in Amherst” (his home) where Miller encounters a street person, “In July, her hair a tangled nest/No bird would return to/Beside the Dickinson home/A cigarette between/Her dirty fingers…” He suggests that Emily Dickinson would have invited the woman into her home for “a bath and breakfast” and when the woman volunteers that she slept on a bench beside the home all night and no one bothered her, Miller writes that he offered her bath and breakfast, “almost hearing Emily say, ‘Yes, oh yes!’”

In Section IV of Entering the Day, Miller’s poem about Virginia Wolfe entitled “Virginia,” shows that he can achieve that which he believes Virginia was capable of: “…her words/Were meant to be elsewhere,/In perfect sentences she could control.” That capability is shown throughout this volume, Miller’s meditations emerging with crafted control over his phrasing. Here is a true voice devoid of mawkishness in the delivery of difficult experiences — poems without cloying lamentations about the ravages of war and an uncertain future —conditions with which we are confronted in the wake of  Coronavirus, “a language wait[ing] to be heard” that Miller seems to be game for, despite…

Michael Miller has published nine poetry collections, and his first book The Joyful Dark was the Editor’s Choice winner of the McGovern Prize at Ashland Poetry Press. His poems have appeared in The Sewanee Review, The New Republic, The American Scholar, The Southern Review, and many other literary journals. In 2014 he became the First Prize Winner of the W. B. Yeats Society Poetry Award and was anthologized in Yeats 150 (Lilliput Press, Dublin).

I am proud to add that Michael Miller is a good friend and supporter of my work. Salut, Michael! We eagerly look for more. And kudos to Susan Entsminger for the lovely artwork on the cover of Entering the Day: “Protea from the Upcountry Farmer’s Market, Maui.”

Order online or from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose CO 81403

HONORING JEAN ZIPP

For years, every Sunday afternoon at 2, o’clock, Gary Entsminger, editor and publisher of Pinyon Publishing, spent several hours on the telephone mentoring his Aunt Jean Zipp in creative writing; later publishing her memoir, Windows: Letters to Ayla, and her poetry in several issues of the Pinyon Review. When Entsminger learned that his Aunt Jean was dying, he continued to encourage her poetry writing, even through the last few weeks of her life, and this month he dedicated Pinyon Review #11 to her, featuring Zipp’s last three poems. This issue of the Review, a journal that celebrates the Arts and Sciences, is a salute to Entsminger’s 94-year old aunt who died in Tucson, Arizona. Jean Zipp had led a multifaceted life as the wife of a serviceman, creating a tactile art gallery for the blind, owning a toy store, working in interior design, and, finally, writing a fascinating memoir. Pinyon Review #11 is a tour de force — by far, the finest issue published by Entsminger and Susan Elliott, artist and co-editor of the Review.

I do not usually tout my own poems that have appeared in the Pinyon Review from time to time,  but I’m especially proud that four of my poems were featured in this handsome issue celebrating Jean Zipp’s life — three lead poems and the end poem written about Zipp’s demise. For the memorial issue, Susan Elliott created a sketch entitled I would like you to keep calling every Sunday at 2, an ink and colored pencil sketch on paper in Zipp’s honor, and Entsminger dedicated a poem entitled "Listening to Liszt and Chopin" to his Aunt Jean, a companion piece for Elliott's sketch.

Pinyon Review #11 showcases a variety of poets and artists, beginning with the cover painting, “By Invitation,” an elegant work of art that gives the reader the impression that he’s looking through a window at a brilliant sunrise or sunset. It was executed by Les Taylor of northern California, a music coach who has found her passion in visual art.

Nine Great Blue Heron images of digital art by Steve Friebert (brother of poet and translator Stuart Friebert ) are scattered throughout this celebratory issue. The first photo of a heron facing a page of poetry looks as if he’s announcing a signal event; in later frames, the great bird (so prevalent in my native Louisiana), is shown fishing and making spectacular liftoffs, then soaring into the beyond.

Friebert’s photographs seem to be a metaphor for Zipp’s take-off into the other world, later emphasized in her poem, “Fine Tuning”:  “If I were to live each day/As if it be my last/I’d have to forfeit custom/Rescind the on and on/Cantata/A petition to Infinity/I sing./ Contingency strikes mocking chords/There is dichotomy/Although they prove me hapless now/I’ll tune them/Presently.”

Robert Lake continues the metaphor in his poem, “Spirit Wings,” then notes that when he finished typing his poem about “A bird/Flying ever so high/Disappears/Within a silver lined cloud,” he observed two doves landing in the persimmon tree outside and thought that Aunt Jean’s spirit was poised to leave the earth. A naturalist, Lake works with glass plate photographic images of Yosemite National Park from the early 20th century.

Many of the poems and photographs focus on the natural world and the ecosystem; e.g. “Solar House Living” by Carla Schwartz “with each new day,/with each new visitor, wonder,/questions,” the voices and images taking readers into sacred places and beyond.

Michael Miller, a poet in western Massachusetts, gives us a brief metaphor of love derived from the natural world in “River:” “Our love is the river/That flows on,/Through darkness, through light,/Over rocks and between them,/Unable to stop.”  Miller has published three volumes of poetry with Pinyon and focuses on brevity of style and understatement in his lyrical phrasings.

Readers are also treated to one of Stuart Friebert’s translations of Elisabeth Schmeidel’s “Mein Clown” (“My Clown”). The translation speaks of the clown as an “escort of my soul…[which] grows quiet too, whenever/love wanders over the graves/pale as a shadow…” Although the poem wasn't intended as a requiem poem for Jean Zipp, it, like many of the poems in Pinyon Review #11, emerges as an expression of the departure of the soul into another realm.

A short story, “Casino Man,” by Neil Harrison, a plethora of notable poets, digital paintings by Jay Friedenberg…this memorial issue for Jean Zipp celebrates her passing with art and song, “singing surrender to a larger life.”

This is a banner issue of Pinyon Review, a tribute to an aging poet who continued to contribute until her passing last month. Pinyon Review #11 is available from Pinyon Publishing 23847 V 66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

IN THE MIRROR

When I read Michael Miller’s work, an image appears in my mind of a poet sitting on a bench near Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts where Miller walks daily and receives the Muse — perhaps even Emily’s Muse. In fact, Miller’s latest book of poetry, In the Mirror, includes a poem entitled “Visiting Emily,” in which he expresses the desire to ask the famous New England poet “…about living, dying, /About the veins of a leaf/As thin as my white hair…” In this poem, he imagines how Emily nods to a 200-year old oak, saying “in a barely audible voice/That the finches will not/Be in mourning on the branches/ Once all the leaves have fallen.” The poem is a salute to the bard of Amherst and to an ancient oak whose branches point upward toward the Pelham hills.  

I have enjoyed a sporadic correspondence with Michael Miller during the last five years, and through readings of his e-mails and the poems that reflect his rich inner life, I think that he represents the best of the group of poets published by Pinyon Publishing, his books appearing almost yearly now through the nurturing of Pinyon and its editor Gary Entsminger.

Like Miller’s publisher I was especially moved by a long poem entitled “A Woman Alone,” about the imagined life of a woman in her ninetieth summer who is traveling on a bus to Barstow, California through the barren Mojave Desert, “basking in the silence/Of miles, of cacti, of rocks embedded/In sand. Only listen, she repeats…” I can easily visualize the scene Miller paints in which the lonely woman misses her garden as I’ve spent many hours in the Mohave and a week one summer near Barstow, comforted only by the sight of Joshua trees. In the succinct verses of sometimes only six lines, this long poem probes mortality with a combined high quality of insight and clarity, exploring the remembrances and poignant laments of the aging:

“This time her daughter arrives

To help her move.

She dreads the open boxes,

What to put in, what to leave out,

Worries she is packing her life away

Never to be opened again.”

In V. of this long poem, Miller evokes his poetic powers with force and brevity, recording the regrets of an old woman: “In the light of the window, /With her still steady hands, /She is sewing a hole in her life, The needle and thread/A companion from childhood/A contrast to the losses/Accumulated through time …” This is a poem about resilience and hope, conveyed through the surprising voice of an elderly person who has transcended loss and suffering.

At every turn, the reader joins in an exploration of undisguised reality, revealing Miller’s sensitivity and awareness of the human condition. However, we are treated to a bit of magic in poems like “Magician,” in which the poet finds within himself a shared rapture with his grandson at his first magic show where Miller “disappears inside him, /leaving [his] death behind.”

In some of our e-mails, Miller has been kind enough to offer evaluations of poems that I’ve published in The Pinyon Review, alongside his creations, but I’m quick to acknowledge his fine, inspired work as profound artistic creations. The end poem, “The Clock’s Hands,” is a lovely tribute to his wife whom he says he would regret leaving, “…leaving the loveliness that has not grown old/But only deepened/With each wrinkle, each gesture:/Spreading the marmalade, /Walking in the garden/To peruse your blossoms,/Placing your pink blouse/On the chair’s straight back/And coming to bed/With a smile beginning./I cannot imagine/Another paradise.”

This is a splendid collection of poems, honest and original, and as I said in the opening paragraph of this blog, Miller represents the best of Pinyon’s poets who have looked at the world and have clearly come to recognize the magnitude of life.

Michael Miller’s poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, The New Republic, The Yale Review, and other publications. He won First Prize for his poem, “The Different War,” awarded by the W.B. Yeats Society and anthologized in Yeats 150. In the Mirror is his seventh book of poetry. Miller lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, along with the same Muse who inspired Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Robert Francis, and other outstanding New England poets. Salud, Michael!

PAINTING THE PINYON REVIEW

Years ago, I encountered a friend from New Iberia in a Barnes and Noble bookstore in Lafayette, Louisiana. He was standing before a rack of books, staring intently at the covers of books that he didn't bother to open. "Looking for something special?" I asked. He barely acknowledged me and continued to scrutinize the covers. As I'm curious about book lovers, I persisted. "What do you like to read?" He frowned, saying, "I never look for book authors or titles; I choose my books according to the color and design of the cover. If a cover attracts me, I buy the book. It's like opening a surprise package."

If my friend should see the latest cover of Pinyon Review #7, Celebrating the Arts and Sciences, he probably wouldn't look much further, and he'd be pleasantly surprised he had chosen a literary journal that would take him beyond the exterior of the publication. The vivid purple and green abstract design of the journal's cover rendered by Susan Elliott, co-publisher of Pinyon Review, is a real eye-catcher. Susan designs all of the Pinyon Review covers, but this one derives from an original painting she created as a watercolor background to accompany poems in Open the Gates, a book of animal-focused poetry by Dabney Stuart. And it's stunning!

"I pressed cellophane into the paint to create abstract designs which I incorporated into images representing forest, ocean, hot air balloon, sky, and land," Susan explains. "I worked on this set of watercolor backdrops while visiting friends in Jericho, Vermont. I recall spreading a dark purple sheet on their deck so I could splatter and splash with abandon. It was spring: birds and flowers popping out, choruses of spring peepers, long distance runs on forest trails..." (Readers will note that Susan's word pictures are as colorful as her actual paintings).

Susan says that two of the bird poems by Stuart needed a painting so she visited the Jericho Settler's Farm to buy eggs and asked if she could collect some chicken feathers. She then created "Quail" and "A Bird, But Who?" with swirling feathers in airy blue and ochre paintings. The dark blue-green and purple feather piece on the cover of Pinyon Review was also created that spring in Vermont. Susan brought it out of archival art boxes this year so that she could scan it, and after making a high-resolution scan of the piece, she enlarged the digital image just enough to emphasize the textures of the feathers and the play between watercolor pigments and rough watercolor paper.

           

Susan had a lot to say about the heavy, rough watercolor paper, which holds more paint (pigment plus water) in the textured grooves. "Normally, watercolor paint dries very quickly but with rough, heavy paper, you have more time to mix 'wet on wet'," Susan said. "This way, you can mix the colors on the paper and let them play together. When the water dries, there is more pigment concentrated in the grooves. The edges of the painting (which were masked with tape) also concentrate the pigment in beautiful patterns, as do the edges of the feather imprints." Voila! The cover of a literary journal that would have entranced my friend who judges books by their covers!

In addition, the Pinyon Review title page image, "Feather Jig," is a reconstruction of focal areas on the full painting. From the digital image, Susan extracted rectangles highlighting the play between paper, pigment, and feathers and arranged the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle-like design, which she described as jiggling "as much as they fit together, invoking a happy dance-like jig." The jig is reminiscent of Susan's personality—lighthearted with a lively dancing spirit.

Susan is what I'd call a "protean woman." She has formidable credentials with a B. S. in Botany and a B.S. in French from Humboldt State University and a Ph.D. in Biology from Dartmouth College, but today she concentrates on the artwork for Pinyon Publishing located on the Uncompahgre Plateau, adjacent to the San Juans of the southern Rocky Mountains. She paints, plays music, designs books, hikes, gardens, cooks, writes, and illustrates books. Her book credits include illustrations for Dabney Stuart's Open the Gates, drawings and paintings for Why Water Plants Don't Drown with Victoria I. Sullivan, and illustrations for Spilled Milk by Gary Hotham. She has co-authored Ophelia's Ghost, Fall of '33, Remembering the Parables and Making the Most of WriteitNow4 with Gary Entsminger, editor and publisher of Pinyon Publishing.

Inside the latest issue of Pinyon Review, readers will find the work of eighteen outstanding poets, a short story, and more art by Jay Friedenberg. Among the poets who have often appeared in this journal are four whose poems represent impassioned social experiences and emotional reflections, including a nostalgic piece by Gary Entsminger.

Gary, whose recent debut book of poetry was Two Miles West, takes readers through a "Wall of Sound" (an excerpt below) in the summer of 1974 when:

he traveled with the band wore tee shirt and blue jeans like
the other guys climbed scaffold to place speakers in the Wall of Sound happy
for the job, already beginning to understand none of this would happen
again...
[while] down front young women danced dresses gliding braless barefeet barely
touching the floor to Jack Straw China Cat Sunflower I Know You Rider
tell the folks back home this is the Promised Land callin'... 

The poem, reminiscent of the style of e.e. cummings and beat poets, is a toe-tapping, robust experience that causes the reader to want more of Entsminger's highly-charged poems. It begs to be read aloud with other people.

Michael Miller, winner of the 2014 Yeats Poetry Prize and author of Into This World and Lifelines, presents poems that underline the fears and sorrows of the human condition. "A Man Alone" captures a universal feeling of loneliness and existential awareness in such lines as 

At the feeder by his window
The rabbit nibbling the wet grass
At dawn in the small park where he waits
For the sun to rise above the shadowed hill. 

In "Fear," Miller's lyric is unrelenting as he articulates the familiarity of fear

in the night of the invisible scalpel,
In the bleeding end of the dark... 

Miller's poems are often startling insights into human vulnerability and reverberate with emotional power.

Luci Shaw, Writer-in-Residence at Regent College, Vancouver, received the 2013 Denise Levertov Award for Creative Writing. Those who have entered their seventh and eighth decades of life will identify with "Green Season," a succinct, sharp poem using the ordinary image of a barn to articulate the onset of aging: 

I turn the pages like old barn doors
peering into the shadowed spaces and
stalled beasts, wondering if I am
a fiction in my own wrecked, weather-beaten
barn of a life. The smell of rich
horse sweat and dung. The life
shivering beneath their flanks...

In sharp contrast, she gives readers the pleasure of "Flowers in Winter:"

...Infect me with joy!"
Though I'm here, inside my house,
I trace with the stalks of my hands how resurrected I feel,
relishing through frosty glass the winter snow that
covers my crocus bulbs, my hyacinths.

Shaw's delight in the natural world invites readers to get on with things as she attends to the business of creating hope with her delightful poetic vision.

New Orleans born Ken Fontenot, who now lives in Austin Texas, won the 2012 Texas Institute of Letters Award for poetry, and his sense of humor often unleashes itself on more serious readers.  In "It Wants to Stay," his tongue-in-cheek observation about dust reminds readers of their mortality in a revelation of the inevitable within the ordinary:

We breathe
the almost nothingness of dust
which survives us all.
Its reappearance trick
takes its time, arriving finally
as a guest announced.
Just run your finger
over the coffee table.
A mote of dust
contains a mote of truth:
it has the last laugh.

This issue of Pinyon Review is a keeper and represents the best of art and poetry. You may want to frame Susan's cover. Copies of Pinyon Review #7 are available at amazon.com or order from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

THE FALL 2014 PINYON REVIEW

During the mid-20th century, "little magazines" began to burgeon in the U.S. Vital independent publishers emerged and have continued to proliferate since that time, and literary and art magazines have become an important part of the intellectual life throughout the country. The Pinyon Review, a journal birthed by Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado, has joined this burgeoning movement and has a mission of producing quality literature, art, and scientific essays through the efforts of Gary Entsminger, Editor, and Susan Elliott, artist and Managing Editor of the magazine.

Although the Pinyon Review is a relative newcomer to the literary scene, it has gained distinction as a little magazine that nurtures an eclectic group of writers and artists from various parts of the U.S., ranging from Colorado to New York. The latest issue, #6, of the Review just arrived in my mailbox this morning, and I think that it's the best issue Gary and Susan have produced.

The lead poem in Pinyon Review #6, entitled "Why I Became A Vegetarian" by Barbara Schmitz, features the flower children, vegans, LSD users, and advocates of free love prevalent during the 1970's when young people felt threatened by ideas about the human race being annihilated by the "Big Bomb."

"Why I Became A Vegetarian" captures the essence of the hippy movement in 17 stanzas of masterful, descriptive lyrics narrated with tongue in cheek humor. "Because we read vegetarian cookbooks/like the Grub Bag with delicious recipes/like cucumbers in sour cream and essays/like the one advocating if people were made/to eat what they killed there would be less/ murder...and All We Need Is Love/Maybe It's the Time of Man/We were Looking for a Heart/of Gold in the eggplant/and in the zucchini." The writer of this poem confesses to being a part of the 70's crowd that extolled vegetarianism, food coops, consciousness raising, and other indicators of a non-conventional movement; but, today, she teaches a writing class and is interested in writing as a spiritual practice.

After spending time in New York City, painter Georgia O'Keefe searched for the light that would illuminate her paintings and found it in New Mexico. It seems that Jay Friedenberg has been on a similar search and discovered that light in "New Mexico Canyon Country," a center of Pueblo culture during the 9th-13th centuries. His hard pastel entitled "Chaco Ruins," located in Chaco Canyon, shows the late afternoon light as it "begins to darken details in the vertical rocks." Friedenberg writes that the adobe and grass hues brighten the landscapes in a pastel that reflects his appreciation for light and for the sweep of the New Mexico landscape. Another pastel of Chaco Cliffs features rocks and vegetation at midday in bright orange and red hues. A final pastel entitled "Canyon Morning" shows light filtering into the Chaco Canyon and is reminiscent of O'Keefe's work in which she often uses deep violet and blue hues to accent dark rocks. These arresting pastels are part of an exhibit that is featured in New York galleries, and I'm sure the exhibit attracts art lovers who appreciate the value of light in desert and mountain paintings.

A dual contribution of poetry and art by Britny Doane and David Burton showcases Corvus the Raven, a bird that would charm Edgar Allen Poe from the "other side." It's an exposition of the bird most people regard as a nuisance but whom Doane defines in "The Sensualist" as..."the sage of tricksters/changing night to day and day to night. / If you listen to my whispers/you may hear the gossip of time/I will never be starved/like my rottenly friends..." Burton's painting features the raven poised on a tree stump rising from a mist, regarding the viewer with "cunnai" (Cajun for cunning) eyes. The painting has a mystical quality Poe would have appreciated. Poet Doane's work will be featured in a book of poetry published by Pinyon Publishing in 2015.

Michael Miller, a regular contributor to the Review, gives readers a brief look into "The Next Room" with a wry description of a couple making love that is overheard through the walls by the narrator. The concise poem eclipses the passage of time and ends with an ironic twist characteristic of Miller's explicit tropes about Passion.

I liked the brief lyrics concerning age in Jean Zipp's "Haunted," in which a "withered, wheelchair worn" man sits, "his mouth agape/ In wonderment gone awry" (that last line is a starkly true line about the aged) and bestows a kiss on Zipp's hand, while she experiences "A lambent moment/Fleetingly retrieved/Who did he think I was?" A Tucson writer, Zipp has written a fascinating book, Windows: Letters to Ayla, published by Pinyon earlier this year.

Editor Gary Entsminger contributes a poem to this issue entitled "Old Bach" who "danced into life with/occult dissonances...and linking new grace notes/and his high wire canons... rubbed his eyelids until/the metal edges and wooden pipes/converged into an image/of wind chests trackers and bellows/saw himself playing the most/complex machine of the 17th century..." Gary, an accomplished musician who plays both country and classical music on several instruments, brings old Bach to life in a portrait poem that will incite readers to call for more of his lyrics.

And, finally, I enjoyed writing the review of Luci Shaw's Adventure of Ascent, a memoir that tells the story of turning points in the career of an aging poet who takes the time to reflect on the spiritual movement in her life as an octogenarian.

The works reviewed above that appear in the latest issue of Pinyon Review are only part of an outstanding literary journal celebrating the arts and sciences, a journal that continues to gain momentum in a literary world devoted to "little magazines."

P.S. The cover and frontispage photographs by John Johansson are striking, and Susan Elliott's beautiful design work underlines the quality of this distinguished journal.

Order The Pinyon Review from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

LIFELINES

I've known for some time that Pinyon Publishing had scheduled the publication of the work of one of my favorite Pinyon poets, Michael Miller. Today, I received a copy of Lifelines, Miller's newest book of poetry, and the book is all that I expected to be—an ardent and profound collection of poems that can be read quickly because there is an immediacy and a strong flow of language in his work. 

The poems probe the serious subject of mortality, love, marriage, and family, touching on the truth with good-humored intensity and expressing wisdom gained from past losses, as well as resilience in the face of fierce fear. I read aloud most of the poetry to a friend, and she agreed that Miller is a major poet who has captured the great themes of poetry with poignance and grace while conveying the suffering and loss inevitable in the human condition.

"Hooks and Eyes" is one of the eminent poems in the section of Lifelines devoted to family relationships. It is a poem about the author's grandmother, a moving and ironic piece that recalls the era when polio threatened the American family: "Do you want to be in an iron lung?"/My grandmother asked,/Ordering me to wash my hands/As that crippling disease/Spread like the war in Europe./Fear became my bullying foe,/Stalking me through summer,/Dragging its steel braces/With black leather straps..." The imagery in the last three lines startles the reader with its awful threat, and I shuddered at the remembrance of one awful summer when the disease struck a friend of the family in hot, swampy Louisiana where diseases often fester during sultry weather. Miller rescues the reader from further awfulness with a cameo of his grandmother in the second part of the poem: "Through the crack in the door/I watched my grandmother adjust/Her pendulous breasts inside the corset./I wanted to pull the long laces/Through the hooks and eyes,/To feel it snug around my body." Those clean, simple lines enfold the reader with the author's deep-felt affection for his grandparent and show his ability to express that affinity without the mawkishness of a less-disciplined poet.

Simplicity and clarity are paramount in Miller's lyrics and are evident in the brief depiction of an obviously "special" newspaper carrier. In "Lighting The Way," Miller writes: "Headlights, twenty yards behind him,/Brighten the tree-lined street/Where he walks briskly at four a.m./Tossing The Berkshire Gazette/Onto the doorways of dark houses/With only his mother lighting the way./On his fortieth birthday he insisted/He would do it alone; his mother let him./From the window I watched/His chunky body in shorts, his flashlight/Lighting the pines, the porches./In his Red Sox's T-shirt/He lumbered forward as if to declare:/I have a life, I have a good life,/I am Alvin Kipple delivering your papers." The tone of the poem and description of the carrier evoke moving images of Forest Gump who captured the sympathies of moviegoers in the film of that name. "Lighting the Way" is the poet's clear-eyed view of a person with limited capabilities who has the determination to work and live a dignified life.

Miller is a master at expressing the ambivalent feelings of married couples, and in the poem "A Lasting Marriage," he again explores uncomfortable aspects of the married state, providing a wise reflection about the depth of long-term commitments: "Now we love deeper, deeper/Than the rage that never crossed/The invisible border into violence./Our lips touch with a softness/Of petals opening into another spring./And although we are old/We join with the half-life/Of an unforgotten passion,/The flow between us/Passing over every stone."

Michael Miller's gifts of observation and psychological acuity have provided readers with unforgettable lyrics about the frustrations of life and the inner changes that take place within humans. He has imbued them with a dignity that creates significant emotional responses in all who search for "lifelines." 

As I said earlier, Lifelines is all that I expected it to be—another triumph from Miller's pen and from the poetry corner of Pinyon Publishing. The beautiful cover art of Lifelines was done by Susan Elliott who designs all of Pinyon's book covers.

Miller's poetry has appeared in The Sewanee Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Raritan, Pinyon Review, and The Yale Review. His poem entitled "The Different War" was the 2014 First Prize winner of the W.B. Yeats Society Poetry Award.  He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.  

Lifelines is available from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

A PUFF FOR PINYON REVIEW #4

I knew I was in for visual excitement and good reading when I opened the fourth volume of Pinyon Review. On the title page of this journal celebrating the Arts and Sciences, a bewhiskered bobcat stared at me, his grey-green eyes watchful for prey. It was a photograph taken by Susan Elliott, artist, illustrator, and managing editor of the Review, who seems to be as accomplished at photographing wildlife as she is at drawing and painting it. From e-mails exchanged with Gary Entsminger, publisher and editor of the Pinyon Review, I knew that the bobcat had wandered near the cabin that houses the independent press he and Susan operate on the Uncompahgre Plateau near Montrose, Colorado. I’m expecting to see a piece of original music composed by Susan appear in the Review any day now since Susan is also an accomplished musician, composer…scientist, gardener, chef…the list of her talents is long!

A long short story in this issue of the Pinyon Review is certain to attract and hold the interest of writers. It’s a cogent lesson for writers about the friendship of a wannabe writer and a seasoned writer/teacher. The wisdom and eloquence of William Blake, e. e. cummings, and Tennyson is included in this gut-wrenching spin about life in the shadow of death. The fulfillment of a teacher’s desire to return to his second home in mountain wilderness and a student’s realization of his purpose in the world combine in a poignant story by Neil Harrison who derived his title “Cold Earth Wanderer” from a passage in one of Blake’s poems: “I traveled through a land of men/A land of men and women too/And heard and saw such dreadful things/As cold Earth wanderers never knew.” Harrison wove many passages about writing into the story without being didactic, and a paragraph toward the end of the story captures the mystique of the writing process better than any manuals on the craft I’ve read: “…There he’d learned the alchemical magic of words, that rare, inexplicable phenomenon whereby the basest of materials, a broken stick, a piece of charcoal, a pencil or pen, could conjure up spiritual gold, imbuing the wielder with a sense of belonging, of oneness with the vast universe in its ever-ongoing creation. At the front of that classroom his teacher and soon-to-be friend, Alan Horn had voiced the precise words Everett needed to hear at the time, perhaps not even fully aware that he was offering the keys to a kingdom…” Wow!

Twenty-four poems showcase the work of poets ranging from haiku by Jay Friedenburg to a prose piece about writing by Jane Hilberry. Friedenberg also treats the reader to his impressionistic pastels of landscapes; e.g., “Blue Mesa,” a soft pastel of an Arizona scene.

My friend, Michael Miller, jolts us into an awareness of our good fortune in having been born in this country in a short poem entitled "Gasoline," when the smell of gasoline evokes an image of “a citizen of Tibet running down the street ablaze,” and he concludes that fortune favors us with “our place of birth/we walk freely/Beneath the vast estate of sky.”

Editor and publisher Gary Entsminger treats us to one of his poems entitled “Masks,” in which he describes a dim view seen at night when he pulls the curtain back and looks out at “the porch cav[ing] into ruined couch/below unshingled casts from lamplight,” a view which is transformed as he ascends “well rested stairs toward bed/as if heaven waits.” Gary, who has written and published many of his poems throughout the years, makes his debut in Pinyon Review with this single poem from his collections.

This edition of Pinyon Review is packed with the work of award-winning and notable poets including Luci Shaw, Robert Shaw, Ken Fontenot, and other fine poets. As a Louisianan, I was drawn to Elizabeth Schultz’s poem about “Reviewing Kate Chopin’s The Awakening,” which is a highly visual poem based on Chopin’s iconic feminist novel. Schultz features the heroine, Edna Pontellier, stripping on the shore of Grand Isle and crawling “through the waves’ swelling sheen,/through the shadows of birds/and sinks with the dolphins around her.”

Stan Honda, who photographs night sky landscapes and is a photographer for Agence France-Presse based in New York City, contributed the cover photograph and a special section of Wupatki Sky photographs for the Review.

Entsminger aptly describes Pinyon Review as one that contains “contrasting colors and images that highlight place and mood during the transition from summer to fall,” and he and Susan certainly achieved that effect when they put together this exciting issue. Impressive!

Order copies from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, Colorado 81403.