Only the Senses Sleep
Wayne Miller
*Winner of the 2007
William
Rockhill Nelson Award in Poetry from the Kansas City Star and
The Writer's Place
*Picked for The Kansas City Star's list of the top 100 noteworthy
books for 2006
*Picked for The Kansas City Star’s list of 10 “highlight”
books for 2006
“In Only the
Senses Sleep, the senses are fully awake much of the time, as Wayne
Miller explores the world through defamiliarizing metaphor and shifts
of perception; but the ‘half-seen’ emerges too, as the poet
discovers ‘the possibility emptiness provides.’ In the frequent
play of light and shadow, breath and air, surface and substance, the least
embodied is often the most deeply experienced. ‘Sometimes the mouth
of the world / opens,’ Miller says, ‘though at the last minute,
/ it always holds its tongue.’ That is often the moment when the
poet most poignantly speaks to us in this wonderfully moving first book.”
—Martha Collins
“Wayne Miller’s
Only the Senses Sleep celebrates the transforming power of attention
and distraction, as the perceived dissolves into memory and reverie. ‘Moving
away from myself // and further into myself’ in a poetry both elegant
and completely natural, ‘the mind keeps trying to arrive / at the
other side of here,’ leaving it refreshed and exhilarated by the
knowledge that ‘retreat // is also a kind of arrival.’”
––John
Koethe
“‘We breathe
light’—this epigraph, a quotation from James Wright placed over
one of the poems, is a key to Wayne Miller’s poetry. His poems are
meditations on light and shadow as they enter our lives—as our lives
enter them. Only The Senses Sleep is the author’s first book—amazingly
mature.”
—Adam Zagajewski
“It’s often
nighttime in these terrific poems, where sleep and poetry and desire sing
a song of being. How worldly this song is too, graced by the likes of
Trakl and Stieglitz and Sappho, and how intelligent and painterly its
approach, with such atmosphere in every scene. What a pleasure to read
Miller’s first book, and to recognize its wisdom, as though ‘every
word I’ve read was in me before I read it.’ What a spectacular
debut!”
––Alan
Michael Parker
" [This] gorgeously
confident book is proof again of the vitality of poetry in the small presses."
––The
Kansas City Star
"Miller describes
both the visible
and the invisible with elegant ease. These poems dissolve the boundaries
between things and across time, so that the strangeness of the world is
apparent: 'the sunlight comes as if through a phonograph needle' . . .
Charting shifting perceptions of an ever-shifting world, Miller's is a
welcome new voice: 'What's at issue is air', he writes, "words gripping
its thick wet fur / while it fills us and leaves us.'"
––Publisher
Weekly, (Starred Review) Reviewed 2006-07-31
"From the quiet
that pervades a nighttime apartment to silent snowfalls and the ferocity
of an ice storm, Only the Senses Sleep sublimely captures a wide
range of environmental experiences in the dark that pervades the corners
of human consciousness."
––The
Midwest Book Review
"For Miller,
memory is treacherous yet essential: its operation foregrounds the absences
that haunt him yet preserves, imperfectly, those present moments that
fall away. . . . the present tense is where the poet seeks to dwell, though
he mourns––eloquently, compassionately––that only
language takes him there."
––Ned
Balbo, Antioch
Review, Winter 2007
"Wayne Miller's
Only the Senses Sleep is a large-hearted and wise book of poems, one
that easily rises above the many piles of debut collections . . . . Beneath
the orchestration of language, contemplation swirls through the dark and
light shadows . . . ."
––Alex
Lemon, the Blomsbury Review
“[I]n Miller’s
poems [. . .] [t]he past becomes a film reel projected on any bare wall,
running day and night, suffusing the present with fragmentary imagery
that is both seductive and disturbing. [. . .] [Miller’s poems] claim
that what we often think of as the rock-solid now is really a fluid thing,
and the desire to plant our feet firmly in anything is its own kind of
foolishness. There’s nothing softheaded about Miller’s complex
thinking. [. . .] Thus this book charms with its refusal to draw finite
conclusions. It never closes the door. It invites rereading.”
––Deborah
Bogen, Lyric
“[I]n creating
interiors of subtle textures and the painterly restraint of a precisionist,
or in turning
to the urban streets of a “city of the smallest narratives,”
Miller activates rich emotional structures that forego conven¬tional
lyric structures of self-revelation and narrative structures of plot,
while suggesting another access to or layer of the story at hand and the
conscious¬ness underlying it. [. . .] Miller’s poems, in their
most powerful but quiet moments, insist on these cross-currents of light
and silence, vision and being.”
––Linda
A. Kinnahan, Notre
Dame Review
“Miller’s
lyric poems are some of the best this reviewer has read for some years.
(And a first book at that.) [. . .] Miller’s sensibility is complex:
literally, a European eye for relationships; aesthetically, a mature love
of sense; actually, a post-Enlightenment, optimistic, American assumption
of possibility, decency, and fair play. Miller believes in the abstract
and the concrete valences of his own reality and in the languages that
he recognizes those valences have bestowed on him and in him. Miller believes
in poetry. [. . .] In Only the Senses Sleep, Miler’s ambition
is artfully actualized at every turn. And a huge ambition it is. This
is not the ambition of
noble, inflated lyrics, but the ambition of striking into the bedrock
of the fundamental essence of poetry itself.”
––Scott
Hightower, Coldfront
Magazine
New
Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
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