Böcker av Joseph Millar

Poems that arise from the currents of felt experience. Joseph Millar's lyrical poems explore work, love, filial connection, life, and death. This is Millar's sixth collection, and it reaches a deeper, more sonic level than his usual narrative voice. A collection of half songs rendered in a hardscrabble lyricism, they are propelled by their shifting, irregular rhymes, half rhymes, and off rhymes. The poems' subjects grow from moments of daily life and their deeper obsessions--love, work, death, desire--and the making of art itself. Touched with more humor than earlier work, and with an unpredictable timing that seems to listen to itself as it travels down the page, the poems are part wonder and part reflection, carried along by their music.

A collection of poetry by Joseph Millar.

"Dark Harvest showcases two decades of Joseph Millar's finest poetic work, including his beloved and award-winning poems centered on the unseen men and women at the margins of American life. Millar's poems don't favor beauty over suffering, nor do they reach for knowledge over mystery-instead, his words carry forward their Whitmanic imperatives: to turn away from nothing, to be awash in contradictions"--

A reissuing of Overtime, the debut collection of poetry by Joseph Millar

Like Conrad's Marlow, Joseph Millar speaks with fierce compassion and the authority of hard-won experience. In his remarkable third collection, Blue Rust, he lays down "the shield of irony" without taking up the consolations of easy sentiment or detached despair. The result is an unstrained originality: lyrics that avoid the metronome, leaps of imagination in which the associative logic never trails off into self-indulgent incoherence. Millar looks hard at a world that is doomed and beautiful. What sets Blue Rust apart is its ability to honor both sides.

Kingdom extends Joseph Millar's articulate devotion to the astonishments of daily life--their mingled beauty and pain. As in his first three books, Millar, like the late Philip Levine, has a keen eye for the hardscrabble details of working-class lives--from California's wheat fields to the Lehigh Valley to the rooftops of Paris and a host of other locales "down here on earth in the kingdom." Perhaps more fully than any recent book, this one calls to mind Dylan Thomas's assessment that the best poems "show us that we are alone and not alone in the unknown world, that our bliss and suffering are forever shared, and forever all our own." Kingdom shows Millar working at the height of his powers, sifting the "rag and bone shop of the heart" for songs and stories. It's his best book yet.