Paper banners

In her seventies, Miller (Who Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions) writes what may be her swan song in this, her excellent thirteenth book. These poems often look at death--her own or her loved ones--from a distance and up close. Her style is evocative and emerges from short lines, repetition, enjambment, run-on sentences, parenthetical expressions, powerful images, and exactly right endings. She is a master of the ending whose implications make one want to read the poem again. This collection holds together topics ranging from Virginia Woolf and Osip Mandelstam, to apricot trees and love, to religion, Hamlet, and loss. The best poem here is "Elegy with Last Lines in the Form of a Haiku," in which Miller speaks of dying and compares it to a "Moonbeam on the bay" shining as a woman "slips silently into/ a satin nightgown." Most of her poems are haiku-like and have vivid connotative imagery. Once a painter, Miller is attracted to painterly metaphors, and readers can see that in this collection as she elegantly fuses descriptions of nature with reflections on her feelings. VERDICT Miller is able to go inside her subjects and draw readers with her. That experience makes this collection one for all libraries.--Diane Scharper

Paper Banners The ancients claim that lightning  pierces the agave,  cooking its heart  to release an elixir. Smoke in a doorway. A wren chirrs. An old adobe returns to mud and dung. Fools dream of crossing the desert in a boat  with its banner to the future.  Pain remembers pain and death pisses into the fire-pit.  That leaves today a tumbleweed of hot wind. More praise  goes to soldiers  than to poets  asleep somewhere cool. Snapped to as if struck  by a drunken car to praise the wren,  the wolf, the open. Maybe forgive them hanging around  the mezcal foretelling events once fired in earth. Mashed and fermented, rank of grilled corn and singed fruit. Pain begets pain and death starves its own wound. Poor soul will thrash getting out  of Jane's skeleton. Hope violets grow  heart-shaped dark green leaves in my loam. My past? Pathos  and principles salvaged  what really happened. Something divine a fire let go  from a fragrance of lemon trees.  I lived to tell it. But one strophe  of Sappho's  fierce feelings  (all is to be dared...) pulped the safe pages I wrote. Given your life  is smoke in a doorway, what can you say? Come dawn the sky  shimmers of emeralds, green wine bottles  empty, stacked on a table. They say the cosmos  isn't hostile. Yet strangles a dove with one hand. The Grand Piano Our five thousand years are up. We are going to die violently. The housekeepers and gardeners burn the furniture  outside the palace in golden light.  The beekeepers weep over the last red milkweeds.  The artists remove the scaffolding. Our job is brutal and necessary: to be with the one we love and to think something in the heart weighs on the heart. Excerpted from Paper Banners by Jane Miller All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.