Post- by Wayne Miller (review)

The title of Wayne Miller’s fourth poetry collection succinctly sums up our current era. At its most basic definition, post- determines that one thing comes after another, yet our affection for its use, and predilection for labeling changes of state, brings a higher order of significance to its appearance in Miller’s poems. The limitless applicability of post- reflects our desire to draw a line in the sand, to demand a Wordsworthian “spot of time” that irrevocably changes one thing into something else. Miller uses the etymological significance of the prefix to give weight to diurnal processes and events catalogued in this collection, casting doubt amid certainty and flexibility within the rigidness of time.

Miller uses metonyms as a recurring stylistic feature of the collection, using abstract ideas as stand-ins for concrete objects. In the opening poem “The Debt,” for example, the speaker writes of debt as a house, and likens a mortgage to his inheritance. Many poems are about family economies, using money and debts to describe interpersonal relationships that span across the divide between the living and the dead. Through subtle shifts of phrasing, the speakers show how money is often the security that holds relationships together. The speaker of the first “Post-Elegy” tells of retrieving a parked car after its owner died in a plane crash: “I was steering homeward / the down payment / of some house we might live in / for the rest of our lives.” The speaker feels the gap created by the deceased loved one by the presence of his or her remaining objects, a hole that has the permanence of a newly bought home. The poem suggests that immortality can be gained by acknowledging the staying power of material goods.

While such subject matter could make the speakers appear cynical, many retain a sense of hard won optimism. Miller uses the title “Post-Elegy” for several poems, and in each of them the deceased subject exists at the periphery, with much of the action focusing on the living witnesses. One particularly poignant moment appears in a “Post-Elegy” midway through the collection. The speaker describes a “blank half-hour on the platform” when he remembers a scene from a hospital, a moment with a doctor “unzipping your abdomen—/ as though your body were a suitcase.” The poem begins in medias res and ends before revealing what was released, thus allowing the reader to linger within the phrase’s many possibilities: could it be a baby? The body’s soul? Such ambiguities allow the speaker to probe the depth of feeling between metrical lines.

The repetition of particular words or phrases allows Miller to connect more intimate crises with larger historical events. Both personal and political states of uncertainty appear in “A Breath in the Record,” which uses historical simultaneity as a way to draw connection between events. The poem begins with a list of dates in parentheses, “(1806 … 1912 … 2009),” then proceeds with dizzying speed to move within and through events. The speaker entreats the audience to “hover here inside this / the moment // of the poem” even as the constellation of pictures eventually settles into a picture of an orchestra performing a particular piece of music, the Leonore Overture No. 2. Even as the poem settles into a particular scene, the speaker’s interest remains on the empty spaces, “the music inside it. / That suck of air” as a flautist inhales before playing a note. “Leaving the Hospital” covers similar ground by using stillness to create tension rather than allowing it to settle into peacefulness, as does “Landings.” In this poem, the speaker searches more meaning in absentia, writing that “Chords, like ladders, work / because of their emptinesses.” Although not explicitly stated, the speaker suggests that the unseen parts of a person, whether their soul or ghostly presence, are what makes one different from another and are the most essential parts of us.

Most of the poems are concerned with small events, but the collection grows stronger when the local is brought into tension with the global. “The Next Generation,” for example, is...