Review by Sharon Tracey
Canticle for Remnant Days is Jane C. Miller’s first full-length poetry collection and she has compressed a lifetime within its pages. The poems are a measuring, a looking back and then forward, marking the days, the longing and joy; where loves goes, where it’s raised. Childhood, marriage, children, love, and loss. The self ever changing.
The book, divided into four sections of roughly equal length, evoke the seasons and rhythms of change. Many poems are tinged with color and there’s the sensation of a light touch, memory as brushstroke.
Time is a star subject and water sometimes the apt metaphor. In “Afterward” (14) Miller writes,
The dock is almost under again.
Since you died, days press their throttling tide
and each night darkness pours its panic,
…
and later, this last line:
for solace, but there is only water.
In “Night Swim” (15) the poet submerges herself as “The pool’s underwater light shines / like a moon. I frog the water, think of nothing / but what I want.” Of her father she writes, “Life of the party, I want you back. / I want you back at the window of 101-C calling down / to the pool ladies, their faces upturned / like sunflowers.”
Miller is a keen observer of the small things that add up in big ways to creating a life, laying out in lyrical lines the meanings she finds. The poems have a lovely flow, which echo the rush and ebb of time. She takes the reader places—out on the road, inside houses, through doors into hidden rooms. There are poems for children, tender poems of marriage, wistful ones of family gone. In “Burrs” (6) she confides,
I didn’t know love came
with asterisks. That’s the lesson.
Violets wild on the lawn, scars
a million stars make in the dark—
our mistakes accumulate.
…
And a reader might be reminded of the burrs later on, reading “Teaching My Children to Drive (20) as the poet writes, “All children are potential / mistakes, by which I mean /accidents playing bumper cars / in utero or traffic, not looking”…
Sometimes titles are almost poems in and of themselves, compressing in a single line the entire feeling of a poem such as “Church of Slump & Weep” (29), “In the Back Seat on I-70 When God Comes to Me at 12”, (49) and “DNA Test to Identify Victim of 1944 Hartford Circus Fire” (57). The latter poem is also a great example of Miller’s ability to fill a poem with vivid and sensory language that draws the reader in: “sweat from white-faced clowns, their hoses / freshening sawdust; the dunged dirt of elephants.”… “the corncob pipe & its lipless man, the fallen / child, her clothes curling back like fading petals,”…
Throughout the collection, the poet reflects on choice and circumstance as in “Psalm for the Unasked-For”: (82)
To give you the yes of the world I have not
felt: sun spackling my kitchen pothos
with its blanching warmth, the moon
fuzzing willows scored by the wind.
I have not stood my ground
in ocean; swept under, have fought
to reach you, salt dried on my skin
like a crystal palace the palm reader
promised me. Children now beyond
preach: swallow the oyster sweet with
brine, blueberries dotting whipped cream;
bloomerang my no with snow-bound lilacs
spring uncorks, listen: birds accordion.
And the title poem and coda, “Canticle for Remnant Days” (89) underscores what has come before it as Miller writes:
1.
The sun, ragged & red, salsas the sea:
the mollusks, the octopuses, all its creatures
puppets of salinity. Don’t we have license
to forget the handwringing of hours
that fill & fall as salt in its cellar?
…
Lines suffused with color and questioning that leave the reader with a feeling of what remains after the hymn and its hum—the spark of remnant days.
Canticle for Remnant Days by Jane Miller
Pond Road Press, 2024, $18.00 [paperback]
ISBN: 978-1-7336574-3-3
Sharon Tracey is a poet and editor and the author of three books of poetry: Land Marks (Shanti Arts 2022), Chroma: Five Centuries of Women Artists (Shanti Arts 2020), and What I Remember Most is Everything (All Caps Publishing). Her work has appeared in Radar Poetry, Terrain.org, Lily Poetry Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and elsewhere. She previously served as a director of research communications and environmental initiatives at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.