GREG MILLER

Now and Then Here and Now: Selected Poems 2022

“My heart’s history—/ you think it’s far, I say it’s near.” This gathering of Greg Miller’s deeply empathetic and rewarding work proves his assertion over and over, page by page. Miller lets us into the guileless movements of his mind and feelings with a directness that is very, very rare today. There is art in his work but little artifice. I find myself believing him utterly, and feeling gratitude for his steadfast dedication to his modest yet enormous project:  “Let me be as the day would have me be/ doing what I do, making what I make.” JONATHAN GALASSI

In these dramatic, exultant, and luxuriously precise poems, Greg Miller leads us to see the invisible, the fleeting, the indelible past with family and strangers, the body locked in pain and desire, the redemptive power of nature: “The fledglings blinked at us, / unperturbed, hopped into the low, spiny firethorn, / up through the rain sheets / into the maple’s broadest arms, / then in ponderous, struggling, / unsteady, boundless flight.” A boy who has been shot “lives long enough to look surprised.” A composer and his harpist wife go “traipsing home with lights/on their heads through the dark woods like miners.” Little escapes the perceptions of this poet of the spacious heart. In his desire to speak “the crazy truth,” poetry’s highest calling, he awes us with life’s grace, wildness, beauty, and sadness. EMILY FRAGOS

Greg Miller’s poetry, Now and Then Here and Now, is everyday Kentucky and a wonderfully unique conversation with English churchmen poets, avant-garde French and Latin poets. His work is a remarkable achievement full of multi-traditional, beautiful, truthful knowledge and his own newly discovered wisdom.
Miller’s poetry is formal and free, a life preserver that will save the reader from drowning in an ocean of hatred and lies that covers two thirds of the world these days. STANLEY MOSS

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