“Tell me a Story”: The Poetry of Wilmer Mills

Wilmer Hastings Mills died at home on his family’s farm in Zachary, Louisiana, on July 25, 2011, at the age of forty-one. Born in Baton Rouge in 1969, Mills spent much of his childhood in Brazil, where his parents were agricultural missionaries for the Presbyterian Church. Growing up on land cleared from the jungle, Mills lived in a house that had electricity each day for only four hours at night and that had no telephone, air-conditioning, television, or computer. His Brazilian friends lived in poverty in primitive mud-and-straw huts. In such isolation Mills, along with his younger brother and two younger sisters, was homeschooled. The children learned how to play music, read the fiction of C. S. Lewis and Tolkien, wrote and illustrated their own stories like the Brontës, and even made up a language of their own. Mills never forgot the Brazil years, which had a formative influence on him.

Back in America Mills attended public schools in Zachary and then finished high school at the McCallie School in Chattanooga. Thereafter Mills enrolled at the University of the South, graduating in 1992 with a b.a. in English. He earned an m.a. from Sewanee’s School of Theology in 2005. Mills served for two years as Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2008–10) and had just been appointed Nick Barker Writer-in-Residence at Covenant College on Lookout Mountain, Georgia (2011), when cancer and death suddenly intervened.

By the end of his life Mills had published poetry in some of America’s leading periodicals, including the Sewanee Review, the Southern Review, the Hudson Review, and Poetry, among others. His widely admired first book, Light for the Orphans (2002), was praised by a number of important poets, including Richard Wilbur. Over the next several years Mills continued writing poems and placing them in various magazines while working on a second full-length collection of verse. Sadly Mills did not live to see such a book accepted by a press.

Now Mills’s widow and literary executor, Dr. Kathryn Mills of the Department of French at Sewanee, has very ably edited Wilmer Mills’s Selected Poems. This collection is made up of some of the best poems from Light for the Orphans followed by a goodly number of later poems that Mills had gathered and arranged in three versions of a second book. These manuscript titles are now section titles in the Selected Poems: Arriving on Time, The Heart’s Arithmetic, and The World That Isn’t There. An acute introduction by the poet Dick Davis and a richly detailed afterword by Kathryn Mills accompany the poems.

The reader of this volume may very well wonder about the catalyst that led to so many memorable poems written in a style both simple and deep. The decisive event in Wilmer Mills’s life as a poet took place in April of 1985 when his mother took her reluctant fifteen-year-old son to hear Robert Penn Warren read his poetry at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana, as the first speaker in the Marie Fletcher Lecture Series in American Literature. As Mills himself said later, Warren opened his eyes to the possibility of writing narrative poems about people he knew or had heard about in his part of the South. To Warren’s subject matter Mills added Robert’s Frost’s traditional style. As Mills put it, “I wanted to write about characters with the uncooked energy of Warren but felt a visceral need to do so in the formal manner of Frost.” Mills was now ready to write the poems of his early maturity.

Selected Poems begins with poems chosen from Light for the Orphans. Many of these are about characters that the poet sees as orphans of modernity—lonely souls who have been cast aside or forgotten and who have suffered pain and loss with dignity. The variety of these characters is remarkable: a castrato...