ASKING THE NAMES
By Michael Miller
Ashland Poetry Press
www.ashlandpoetrypress.com
Amherst poet Michael Miller could be the very definition of a late bloomer: Now in his late 70s, he has penned seven volumes of poetry in the last several years, and he’s not slowing down.
In his newest (and eighth) collection, “Asking the Names,” Miller explores some familiar themes from his other books: aging, love, the scars and horrors of battle, the beauty of the natural world, and memories of his reckless youth.
Miller, who served in the Marine Corps from 1958 to 1962, also includes one section in his new book that honors patients at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
His free-verse poems are accessible, concise and tightly knit, without an extraneous word. And when it comes to love, Miller is tender and gentle rather than overly romantic, measuring relationships that have survived long years to ripen into unspoken understanding.
In “Silence,” Miller writes of a wordless communication between two people that “Is greater than anything we can say. / This is where love becomes / a meadow blossoming, / This is where I can hold you / Beyond the ephemeral touch, / Beyond the unfolding petals of desire / Which must always close.”
Contrast that with the blunt imagery of “Wreckage,” in which a soldier who served in Afghanistan remembers a buddy mutilated by a roadside bomb: “In Texas, in the burn unit, / Perez was almost unrecognizable, / The skin grafts from his thighs / Like islands upon his face.”
And in poems like “Momentum,” the poet looks back on the innocence of youth, when he felt invulnerable and the complexity and pain of life was something far in the future:
“Gunning down Broadway / Our bicycles weaving between traffic / We pedaled with ferocity, / Gaining the momentum / Missing in our lives. / Daring, our drug; speed, / The fuel that drove us, / and every accident / Happened to someone else.”
WATER STREET
By Naila Moreira
Fishing Line Press
www.nailamoreira.com
With a doctorate in geology and a career that includes teaching science and nature writing at Smith College, Naila Moreira has her feet planted firmly in the natural world and in nonfiction writing.
But Moreira, a freelance journalist and the writer-in-residence at Forbes Library in Northampton, also draws inspiration from the natural world for poetry.
In a new chapbook, “Water Street,” Moreira has used the Mill River in Leeds, and critters such as minks, bats and frogs she has observed there, as a starting point for poems that “reflect on the tension between freedom and domesticity,” as she said in an interview last fall.
In the title poem, for instance, the narrator describes a sweet fragrance from her garden that makes her forget everything: “To live here I left my husband, / I left the world. / The scent floats over the waterfall / that endlessly washes the world clean.”
And “Frogs” is a lament for the many ways the human race bruises the natural world, as the narrator accidentally runs over some frogs during a late-night drive on a winding rural road.
“I cried as I hit them / And slowed the car to a crawl, / Trying to see them first, but still they rose, / Unexpected, small white innocent forms / Like phantom children jumping in the rain. / They were, perhaps, trying / To make more of themselves, / Away from the eye of man … Why couldn’t I leave them alone?”
“Naila Moreira is a natural born pantheist,” writes one reviewer of the new collection. “Her day job is writing articles on sustainability of the environment and her poetry is reflexively in love with the earth.”