* reading with wayne miller

This week, I thought I’d share a poem from Wayne Miller’s latest collection, Post- (Milkweed Editions), which I wrote about earlier this week for the Cincinnati Review blog.

In my review of the book, I spoke about poems that engaged with the idea of inheritance in relation to the nature of language itself. This week’s poem, “Inside the Book,” explores such territory.

In this poem, the speaker meditates on their daughter’s efforts at reading “these trenches of script.” The lyric quickly develops a sense of the physicality of reading; when the daughter is described as wanting “to lift that world / into her own,” the reading act is being understood as a visceral experience. The effort is narrated in physical terms, which imbues the daughter narrative with a great deal of determination.

This meeting of “worlds” culminates in an ending that takes the poem, poet, and reader to a metaphysical level, indirectly pointing out the ways in which language and reading act as hinges between us.

*

Inside the Book – Wayne Miller

For my daughter: these images,

these trenches of script. She keeps

reaching to pull them

from the page, as if the book

were an opened cabinet;

every time, the page

blocks her hand. They’re right

there – those pictures

vivid as stained glass,

those tiny, inscrutable knots.

They hang in that space

where a world was built

in fits and erasures – she wants

to lift that world

into her own.

Meanwhile, this world

floods her thoughts,

her voice; it fills

the windows, the streets

she moves through;

it reaches into her

as the air reaches into her lungs.

Then, before we know it,

here she is with us

inside the book.

*

Happying booking!

José