Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008 by Eleanor Ross Taylor (review)

177 Book Notes by silence, his poems too often direct themselves towards their own isolation. His craft, the careful finish of his language and syntax, sometimes strands his poems in their own loveliness. In “Notes on the Night Highway (II),” for instance, the writing never rises past the limitations of its title. “The radio tower lost beneath its flashing” and the lightning that “lifts the fields // sharply into view” seem isolated from each other and from the poem’s attempts at serious reflection. Even those (“I try to believe we live in love’s body— // so when it forgets us we’re still organs / pulsing for life”) fall a bit flat. “A sculptor’s chisel pierces stone exactly / to its sculpture” is true, in a way, but nonetheless fails to alchemize the poem’s various elements. In these moments, one wishes Miller would put more pressure on his materials. The Book of Props, however, is characterized more by its strengths than by its weaknesses. In the third section, What Night Says to The Empty Boat (Notes for a Film in Verse), the lives of his characters, Justine, Andy and Clarence, pivot on the axis of the title lyric, which offers, “projected into the rowboat / Clarence has left floating in the slip,” the night’s own words, a love song to the boat. Its promises, stark and inhuman, are also some of the most felt lines in the volume. The night assures the boat, “I will hook my stars / in the water beneath you / in the skim of water that floats here within you. / And this is the way / believe me, we will not disappear.” Against the fears and frustrations of the sequence’s characters, against the fears of the poet himself, the night’s words are an insistence on love and its durability, the home to which Miller’s poems always seek to return. Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2008, by Eleanor Ross Taylor Louisiana State University Press, 2009 reviewed by Kevin Prufer For a long time, I had no idea what better poets meant when they talked about a good line of poetry. It seemed to me that one typed away at a poem until it reached a width of, say, three inches. Then one hit return and began anew, a little lower on the page. And sure, I allowed, some poems had what we called colorado review 178 meter, which I’d learned to categorize in groups called iambic (for the making of a sonnet), trochaic (best if I was feeling forceful ), spondaic (strictly for shouting), or dactylic (great for the bawdy or dirty-minded), among others. Beyond these, there existed a more loosely constructed non-metrical rhythm (Eliot liked it) and, beyond that, free verse (and the accompanying freedom I, like Whitman, admired). To tell the truth, I hadn’t given it much thought. And then in graduate school I happened upon the poems of the much underappreciated Stevie Smith, whose lines seemed to veer wildly through runs of romping anapests, then to pull up short on a caesura, to pause, to look around and rethink themselves. They’d fall into pensive free verse, pick themselves up with a cheerful trio of dactyls, stop again, breathe, grin, or sigh. But it wasn’t the fluidity with which Stevie Smith moved from one poetic mode to another that astonished me, but the fact that this constant shifting always suggested a brain behind the poem at work on a problem, a speaker of two (or three or four) minds who had not yet decided how she felt—and communicated that indecision (and complexity) not just through the literal meaning of her words, but through the temporary, unsettling music that accompanied them. Every line of poetry, after all, has its own music, suggesting, often in counterpoint, the needs, ambitions, and unstated anxieties of the speaker. This is one of the things a line of poetry (as opposed to a line of chopped-up prose) does best, it seems to me: it facilitates the expression of internal conflict, indecision , and complexity. I wouldn’t discover another modern poet who’d learned this lesson half so well until I came...