Club Icarus (Volume 20)

Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry

by Matt W. Miller

Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2012.

With muscular language and visceral imagery, Club Icarus bears witness to the pain, the fear, and the flimsy mortality that births our humanity as well as the hope, humor, love, and joy that completes it. This book will appeal to sons and fathers, to parents and children, to those tired of poetry that makes no sense, to those who think lyric poetry is dead, to those who think the narrative poem is stale, to those who think that poetry has sealed itself off from the living world, and to those who appreciate the vernacular as the language of living and the act of living as something worth putting into language.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Jenna]

Club Icarus is the second book by Matt W. Miller, selected by Major Jackson as the winner of the Vassar Miller Prize. (No relation exists between the two Millers: Vassar was a lifelong Texan, Matt a native of Lowell, Massachusetts, now based in coastal New Hampshire.) As the title suggests, the book is intensely concerned with fathers, sons, and men in general, with an experience of life that is deeply physical: that is, intimate with both physical labor and physical sport and, as these things necessarily entail, an inevitable component of physical danger and bodily degeneration. Running throughout the book is the narrative of a man -- the primary speaker of the poems -- coping with his father's death from a long-drawn-out and painful illness; a related narrative thread involves the same man becoming a father to a young daughter. There is an interest in the physical nuts and bolts that "hold together what's left" of the world: these poems take place on sets rich with nails, pipes, insulation, dock ramps, handspikes, windlasses, "Bobcats, blowers, and Scags," tools, guns. There are poems rooted in the experiences of being a pallbearer, being a prison guard, being on a football team. One poem -- this one written in the second person rather than the first person like the three just mentioned -- envisions the battlefield horrors lived by a military mortician who suffers PTSD upon returning to Lawrence, Massachusetts. And then there are poems embodying a serious philosophical concern with the myths once so vital in giving shape to lives arcing from boyhood to manhood, myths about being a strong, stoic hero like the role models in comic-book pages who throttle the villain and get the girl: these poems ask what happens if these myths cease being relevant? What becomes of "this soft / wondering of fists" if "There / are no villains," "No easy enemy to swoop down upon. / Just debt, taxes, and acid reflux"? One poem ("See You in the Funny Pages") posits a link to our current-day epidemic of gun violence, another ("A Democracy of Devils") to our volatile, perhaps apocalyptic relationship with the environment. The poems are free verse, mostly narrative-based, using a frank colloquial language with an especial interest in the possibilities of the long, run-on sentence (the title poem, which well deserves to be a title poem, is a single sentence stretched out over 34 lines). Sometimes poems are broken into couplets, sometimes tercets that give a sort of Dante-esque dignity. And there are exquisite images here and there: "the witch-haired wall / of whitewater" (in a poem about surfing), "her / crotch now a naked spider / in the limp of fluorescents" (in a poem about watching a woman give birth).

Note: Apparently due to some glitch, Miller's other two books (Cameo Diner and The Wounded for the Water) are currently listed on Goodreads under a separate author listing for "Matt Miller," rather than "Matt W. Miller."

[Kate Hanson Foster · Rating 5 out of 5]

I often return to Club Icarus just to read the poem "Ashes" over and over again. "Tell me out of the tunnels. / Tell me the sun, / the wax. Tell me again / about the water." The whole collection is packed with lilting fresh surprises.

[Logan · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 stars

For the most part, these poems are ok – passable or confusing – but every now and the some amazingly new, fresh, and surprising poems show up. Some poems here truly made me think deeper about some of the subtle things in life, and despite the average poem present here, the few that make it amazing are enough to warrant a 3.5 total rating.

Edit: I always rate books better in the days after I read them. On reflection, I was actively checking how much was left in the book, so I'm giving it 2 stars instead.

[Maureen Stanton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Manly poems, but I like them too!