Greg Miller’s latest volume of poetry, Now and Then Here and Now, combines everyday Kentucky with English churchmen, and avant-garde French poets. In a collection that is both personal and political, Miller offers quietly meditative lyrics that ponder the human spirit’s diabolical and divine tendencies.
“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
For a free copy, please use the contact form at the bottom of my home page.
This collection draws heavily from the core devotional strain in Miller’s poetry, offering what novelist Fenton Johnson described in his review of Iron Wheel as “the vision and experience of that place where dark merges seamlessly into light; the house and home of grace—unasked for and perhaps undeserved, but transformative all the same.” Framed by meditations on the beginnings and possible post-human ends of culture, the new poems reflect on the callings and limits of art in responding to desire, history, mortality, and injustice. Set in the American South, Wales, France, the Czech Republic, and Sudan, the poems address and invoke the divine.
“What one longs to find in poems is not simply evidence of an ‘examined life.’ We desire a luminosity that startles us in the midst of our losses and loneliness, gestures of hope that can drive out the demons of indifference and resignation, images that help us ‘construct a more capacious consciousness.’ Greg Miller’s poems meet such yearnings.” MARK S. BURROWS
“Miller explores the shared terrain of the spiritual and the quotidian through carefully wrought poems that also reveal a great depth of emotional intelligence. The author clearly has an affinity for poetry that has come to be called metaphysical–a noted literary critic, he recently published George Herbert’s ‘Holy Patterns’–but he wears his scholarship lightly.” LIBRARY JOURNAL
Written in a language rarely heard in modern devotion, the poems in Rib Cage show old communities disintegrating, extended families dispersing, and people in economic or personal distress struggling for dignity and a clear sense of their predicaments. From plain speech to evocative lyricism, from free verse to hymnlike eloquence, Miller deftly gives voice and a history to the places he creates–places that, in the end, expand to encompass all of humanity.
“The subject matter is often gritty, the lines are pungent, and there is no attempt to prettify. Yet Greg Miller’s Rib Cage is not only strong, it is graceful, too . . .. I admire this book enormously.” FRED CHAPPELL
“I particularly like Greg Miller’s combination of the awkward and unfinished in feeling and tone with the ‘finish’ of his language and versification. It’s a difficult balance to achieve, but he manages it magnificently.” THOM GUNN
“In Miller’s poems, redemption has more to do with a truthful accounting of the world than with transcending it into a sacred reality . . . . His gifts are always in the service of the large, important issues that his poems treat. He’s one of the best poets in his generation.” TOM SLEIGH
