Y by Leslie Adrienne Miller (review)

In the Information Age, when seemingly everything knowable can be found by a nearly instantaneous search, Leslie Adrienne Miller writes in Y that the “adversaria” remind “us that ‘information’ is (often delightfully) unstable and always at the mercy of its own rhetoric,” and she scatters this “trail of breadcrumbs from her forays into disciplines beyond her own.” These sixteen collaged direct quotes divide her book into eighteen sections of no more than four poems—all “Secure/ math , she assures us, is just that.” In a book that questions secure notions of motherhood, desire, science, language, and poetry, we read the adversaria “in search of answers to questions the poems themselves collectively ask and only provisionally answer” and scan the list of references—Fanny Howe, Ezra Pound, a fortress of PhDs—wondering where these imaginary gardens with real toads are, what else is there, and how to find them. In her sixth collection of poetry, Miller’s evocative questions probe knowledge itself, asking why and Y and why.

“Perhaps it’s a thread that needs to be pulled,” suggests Miller in the opening line of the title poem of the book, and why not? She admits “she has always observed / men sideways” in “a long habit of fear.” For to ponder Y—meaning masculinity, meaning gender, meaning psychology, meaning genes, meaning the female parent of a male son—means unraveling a motherhood that came “to me late in life” and a child “born into” her “forty-five years” as she says in her previous collection The Resurrection Trade. She ponders this male child, this gift, against her previous book’s backdrop of the female body once dissected so doctors could more intimately know the female reproductive organs drawn, flayed, and heavy with bloom. Y is an eloquent exploration of maleness, of how the child comes to maleness, and of where maleness marks the body through the gaze of the other—parent, neighbor, girl child, voyeur.

Y is a pondering of learning, of what and who is the parent of the man as it delves into myths and fairy tales of gardens, magic forests, and the imaginary. On quantifiable knowledge she asks, “Where, in the child’s flesh will these reckonings lodge,” and in “Vestigial” she notes, “The child believes he can divine / cures for predicaments of fact,” and makes the parental wish to keep her child in the garden, in innocence, because “who wouldn’t want to freeze him / here in the forest of magical foray.” This foray is the site of Miller’s own reckoning, with its beasts, cats, witches, and angels, as she misremembers Willa Cather’s line “The heart of another is a dark forest, always” but resolves,

that knowing the beast doesn’t shame him,that proximity invites peril, that evenwith his snout smeared in huckleberry juice,his eyes too tiny to detect you in the bramble,he is the intimate who stumbles toward you,navigating by smell alone, with damage in mind

even as she feels her own heart, the other, the child moving through the first signs of rejection, and knows that “the garden gate is already / locked, and we are in the bloody / woods.” Miller’s Y is a stunning rendering of children’s stories against the urban landscape, here and abroad, even as it reflects a desire to know this dark forest into which the mother poet has stumbled. The collection is written with lyric beauty, cadence, and resolve.

In Y Miller delineates the complexities of parenting the child and the difference a “y” makes in flesh and thus faces the naughty antics of boy tempting and learning the limits in “a game he suspects / he shouldn’t play” in “The Lucifer Effect,” but in one he’s “inclined to experiment”:

adversaria

… my child has made me enduring plural more than I, but not quiet we… don’t as I do, especially don’t as I. I chose this city because I had a notion that mothering was cause for celebration here…. The mother tongue is a grave and...