Thunderbird

Thunderbird

Jane Miller, 1949-

Book - 2013

Written as an elegy for her parents, Jane Miller's Thunderbird investigates cultural memory while invoking ancient and the ultramodern. This book-length sequence of short poems scrolls without interruption, exposing death's facility in transforming family and home. On a larger scale, the poems explore how the body and mind can redeem loss, even when challenged by the terrors of the Holocaust and modern militarism. Moving variously through such places as an emergency room, and ancient olive grove, the streets of Berlin, a movie set, the "night-petaled black heaven," and thus ultimately the world of spirit, Miller plies the many incarnations of the thunderbird to examine mortality, madness, and love. As my patient's p...upils whiten, they are like comets stopped by a severe stare, it is like feeling the jet to death the empty billeted corridor, it is like looking at a comet and seeing the moving stairs to it, as welcoming and bombed.

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Subjects
American poetry > 21st century.
Death > Poetry.
Published
Port Townsend, Washington : Copper Canyon Press [2013]
©2013
Language
English
Main Author
Jane Miller, 1949- (-)
Physical Description
xii, 65 pages ; 23 cm
ISBN
9781556594410
  • Ecstasy
  • The Tree Entire
  • Nature
  • Wishing Well
  • Accident
  • & Darkness Moves In
  • Stranger
  • Empire
  • Feeling
  • Loaded for Bear
  • My Sad Pony
  • Without Thinking
  • Acquisition
  • Loyalty
  • Dominion
  • Cameo
  • Lead us to Wonder
  • Bloody Hounds
  • Belling the Leader of a Flock of Sheep
  • Metaphor
  • Together
  • So-And-So
  • Star
  • Freaks
  • Resemblance
  • Future
  • Verboten
  • Far Cities
  • Forgiveness Granted
  • Evergreen
  • Time
  • Snow
  • Now
  • Leading Men
  • Physicality
  • Exquisite
  • Dead
  • Lights
  • Again
  • Our Love
  • The Invitation
  • Moonset
  • Begging
  • Tomorrow
  • That I
  • Gone
  • Creation
  • Boundaries
  • Saving me the Trouble & the Time
  • My Humanity
  • Frightening Moonlessness
  • An Optimist & A Fantasist
  • Memory
  • Reputation
  • Wrought Iron
  • Comes from the Server the Same Banished Wines
  • No One Is Home Where I Once Lived
  • Happy Birthday
  • My Severed Head
  • Death's Yellow Hospital Drip
  • Demystifying Jane
  • Feeding the quivering nighthawk
  • Surrender
  • Marriage
  • Like A Locket
  • A Little Myth
  • My Pastoral
  • Blue Field
  • Yellow Field
  • Purple Field
  • Consciousness
  • Statues of Moss
  • Sticks of Flesh in Transit
  • Rain Lilies are Gypsies Too
  • Purple Thistle
  • Written On Water
  • Romantic Figures
  • Quivering Glass
  • Wild Figs
  • Street of Dreams
  • Let's Take Home One Rock
  • Knowledge
  • Leafless
  • Sheep
  • Granite
  • In A Tree
  • The Reader
  • The Reincarnated
  • A Rose Petal
  • A Young Poet
  • About the Author
Review by Booklist Review

Award-winning poet Miller comes alive in her tenth collection, a series of short poems that ruthlessly bleed from one into the next. Inspired by the thunderbird of Native American culture, a symbol of sky power, Miller's concise but farseeing poems are like snapshots capturing the dichotomy between modernity and old age, peace and the monstrosity of war, all framed within explorations of nature up close and on the scale of landscapes. Miller uses words like watercolors as she paints a portrait in Blue Field of a fetus lying on yellow and green earth / dreaming purple and azure above / then the cesarean. Through these masterfully vivid glimpses, Miller reveals her unearthly and illuminating vision, a glimmer of life from above.--Suhy, Annie Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review

Bright, spiky, bold, immediate, and not always eager to explain itself, this latest collection from Audre Lord Prize winner Miller (A Palace of Pearls) finds the speaker drenched in ecstasy ("in a mist of particles"), grappling with "a brain crushed sideways," grabbing "brute memory" as the sole guard against oblivion, bowing to fate ("a cat loose among hounds/ that I do not think got killed by accident"), relentlessly puzzled ("why is someone from time immemorial/ hiding young consenting neighbors/ in the dark must of a cemetery// for a release of warm semen"), but determined to bear witness ("Celan and Mandelstam depart in a boxcar/ before strangely burning down to darkness") and open-minded even when she's floundering ("I am the world's worst compass/ just curious"). It's an onslaught of emotion, and if (like the reader) the speaker can feel overmastered, she's got fight: "the will is not free/ .but gets it up faster than a porn star." In the end, Miller strongly discounts the idea that what she's saying to us "is only language," for, as she proves, language is powerful and cannot be undone. VERDICT A sophisticated work that sophisticated readers will love.-Barbara Hoffert, -Library Journal (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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