Poems in Black & White (review)

Seventeen poems, a couple rhyming, but mostly free verse, focus on manifestations of light and dark. Poems describe a newborn's hospital-record footprints ("First Steps"), a comet in the night sky ("Comet"), moonlight through window panes ("Tic-Tac-Toe"), and various animals ("The Cow," "Raccoon in Winter," "King Crow"), often personifying or taking the voice of the subject. A few conceptual glitches occur ("Dog-Eyed" rests on the largely debunked belief that dogs see only black and white, recent events make Pluto misplaced in the list of planets chalked on "Miss Fitzgibbon's Board," and the newborn footprints are mighty large), and there's a definite adult flavor to the viewpoint, though the verses are sometimes less sophisticated in execution than they are in vocabulary. The black and white theme is nonetheless an imaginative one, and a few particularly creative entries go beyond the mundane, addressing sequential contrast in "The Tunnel" and making a random concurrence significant in "Dad's Closet." Miller's hand-printed monotypes are, logically, black and white themselves; while draftsmanship is sometimes stiff, textures range from smudgy and mottled to linear strokes resembling scratchboard, and their treatment of contrast is intriguingly ambiguous, with smoky shadows in their whites and highlights on their blacks. Despite the book's drawbacks, the slenderness of the volume will reassure readers with little poetic stamina, while young writers may be inspired to write black and white verses of their own.