The Comma after Love: Selected Poems of Raeburn Miller
edited by Donald Justice, Cooper R. Mackin,
and Richard D. Olson.
The University of Akron Press
Akron Series in Poetry, 1994.
114 pages; $24.95 (cloth); 12.95 (paper).

Review by June Owens

If ever a book of contemporary poetry by a largely unknown poet deserved out attention, that book is The Comma after Love: Selected Poems by Raeburn Miller, who died in 1990 just short of his fifty-sixth year. Not to say that this is the poet's first book; another, Millenary, and two chapbooks precede it, and the University of Akron Press will offer the Collected Poetry of Raeburn Miller in a special edition on computer disk. What I mean is that Miller's posthumously published collection is a necessary addition to the shelves of lasting work.

In the introduction, Donald Justice, whose work is widely acknowledged and admired (Lamont Poetry Selection, 1959; Pulitzer Prize, 1980), says of Miller, "He was a natural poet who found writing a thing he did simple as a part, an important part, or staying alive." The poems comprising The Comma after Love were chosen from over nine hundred Miller left behind. Justice did the choosing. He chose seventy-four poems, hand-picked so that we can appreciate as diverse a spectrum of Miller's work as is possible in one brief book--from pieces based on classic and foreign forms to deeply meditative, inventive, indeed reverential ones. And we are mentally, emotionally rattled by their contents. Almost all of these poems, particularly the long ones have the same pair of appealing traits--Miller may tear at the tissue of our composure, but, even at their saddest, the poems celebrate. They talk with us. They speak for us. In these cold, double-talk days of rap and zap and everybody's out to get me, Jack, beauty spoken in Miller's quiet, graceful voice answers our need for sanity and clarity.

Justice shares a brief, fascinating story: Miller's teacher had assigned the writing of a complete sonnet, with a week's deadline. During the short walk home, Miller wrote five or six sonnets, in his head. Justice tells us, too, that Miller wrestled with certain concepts--sexuality, religion, love--and while the poems bear that out, one wonders if his largest struggles may not have been with meanings, with life and loss. Whatever the underlying factors, these poems decant their brilliant observations back and forth from one vessel (Miller) to another (us), like a fine new wine.

"Two Poems for Megan" carries us along on calm, river-like sentences that tremble with tenderness, anticipation, wonder, love. In its first section, Miller is speaking to an unborn daughter. And to himself. In its second, he is speaking to a "one-day girl." And to himself. We are lulled to false complacency, for the waters of this poem are deeper, stronger than we think. Soon we feel the tug of powerful undercurrents, anxiety, uncertainty, misgiving, fear, and these undercurrent, like drowning men, almost pull us under. A poem darkling and flashing from line to line, hopeful, hopeless, despairing, joyful, is "Clouds and Syllables." "1/1/__" tries to trick us with its dilemmas, but is as much a love poem as the gorgeous one that follows it, "Poems Instead of a Letter." In "The Right Choice," Miller again alternatively addresses the reader, himself, and a tiny child, closing, as many of his poems do, without solution:

	But because, even as the young,
	We are subject still to dreaming,
	For what it's worth I pray
	Love is the right choice,
	The center posed beyond
	Occasional doubts and losses,
	The safe place from which
	We need not dread to fall.

A shattering, 114-line study, "Two Fragments toward a Suicide Note," lets us in on how we may decide to murder ourselves. Its refrain, "Save that to die --," is situated in unanticipated places, a good device giving the poem might impetus. Of it ("Two Fragments...") we may wonder if it is not, in fact, the cantus firmus of the whole book, if the other long pieces are but fine descants to it.

The "Prose Poems" that nudge us toward the book's close are wonderful, especially "IV." in "Group I":

	Oh yes, there are ghosts, but only in the street.  I see them,
	thin and crucial, not because they were there once but
	because they are there now.  And the colors are green and blue
	on the street now, though where you are it may not be the
	same.... And inside, the colors as well that once were so
	gaudy are shaded, undone, changed perhaps outside to that
	mere green and blue, as it may be even where you are.

It is no mere coincidence, we think, that the dominant colors on this book's handsome cover are dark shades of green and blue. A very nice touch. "Convertible Invocations," with its mix of pure and slant rhymes, is delightful in its freshness. All masculinity, honor, and honesty, "An Eventual Elegy" talks about time flying in vulture circles and about our false memory of the dead. It could be our own rueful, belated threnody to ones we ourselves have last. The next to last long poem, "The Shape of Things," asks (and does not ask) a granddaughter not to cry. Few claiming to value poetic imagery or human passion will remain unmoved by its last lines, their sense of utter isolation when the soul of the poet sits making love to loneliness:

	I went back to the Texas coast and sat for a time
	On random driftwood, poking at clam shells and sand dollars,
	While the bloodshot heavens widened over me
	And the water rolled at my feet like a tear.

There are also a few fine sonnets here that use enjambment in creative ways, brief pieces of rhymed verse, and two excellent entries ("Poets and Their Bibliographies" and "Recalling Cottonwoods") that feel like villanelles but, in the purest sense, are not. "Triptych" wants to be an amusing little divertissement but is not half as funny in its deepest roots as it pretends. One or two of the poems, such as "A Red Red Rose," are discursive, but even they disarm with their wide-openness. And some ("Decor" and "Rationale of Dissipation") seem just a bit thin for what is a serious set of works, although they do display a certain quirky wit. The book ends with five pages of poems grouped under the title, "Some Sums," an ending that seems mysterious until we remember what Justice explains in the introduction: the epigraph-like poems appear on the final pages, where one might want a strong closing piece, because the poems are grouped chronologically within their several categories, and "Some Suns" are the last of Miller's unpublished works. While these very short portions stand complete as they appear--some of the three-liners read like modern haiku and that may have been Miller's intent--still others are little ghosts of thoughts, jottings, some carelessly tossed off, it seems, to which the poet may have meant to return but which are caught in mid-cry, quite beautiful nonetheless: "here and / there, here / and there, / here and / there there" and "Leave a space between the words / as if you were telling the truth." Others have the aspect of flint sparks before the fire leaps: "Old age, choosing / vanilla ice cream."

What we learn from The Comma after Love is that Miller knew, intimately, about death-thoughts, the coyness of tears, caged cobras, pitched roofs, thin arms flung out, letters on refrigerators, and dark gardens. His poems are, as Justice says, self-reflective. They are also rich, civilized, and humane. Unfortunate are we that Miller, who has given us a literary "joy beyond any fanfare or fluttery regret," cannot give us another thirty-years worth. He would have left us with much more of his exceptional, wise, sorrowful, sometimes wry, always uniquely-stated poetry. Did he really prefer, above all else, death and silence? Some of the poems say so. Still, we must be grateful for what we do have of this important poet. In Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer said, "Unknowe, unkist, and lost, that is unsought." Reader, go in search. Get to know the green and blue poetry of Raeburn Miller.