What do you think?
Rate this book
Dark Harvest: New and Selected Poems, 2001–2020
Powerful poems about men and women at the margins.
Dark Harvest showcases two decades of Joseph Millar’s finest poetic work, including his beloved and award-winning poems centered on the unseen men and women at the margins of American life. Millar's poems don’t favor beauty over suffering, nor do they reach for knowledge over mystery—instead, his words carry forward their Whitmanic to turn away from nothing, to be awash in contradictions.
Dark Harvest showcases two decades of Joseph Millar’s finest poetic work, including his beloved and award-winning poems centered on the unseen men and women at the margins of American life. Millar's poems don’t favor beauty over suffering, nor do they reach for knowledge over mystery—instead, his words carry forward their Whitmanic to turn away from nothing, to be awash in contradictions.
- GenresPoetry
136 pages, Paperback
Published November 24, 2021
2 people are currently reading
14 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 3, 2022
I came to this collection as a strong Millar fan, so my high rating is unsurprising. This is a really good introduction/summary of Millar's work, and I hope it draws more attention his way. Some takeaways:
Overtime is strongly represented. That's not surprising--to the limited extent that I know, I think that's considered his best collection. Fortune is the least represented, and it falls somewhere between the lengthy, vivid worlds painted in Overtime and the more sparse and unresolved descriptions of Blue Rust. Kingdom strikes a better balance, in my opinion--we get the vivid descriptions but end more often on a beautifully open-ended note. After reading Dark Harvest, I think I will slide Blue Rust and Kingdom back into my "to read" pile--in particular, the beauty in Blue Rust really jumped out at me this time around. So, that was a bit of an unexpected development. The new poems haven't stuck with me as much, but that might just take some time. Case in point, poems that hadn't captured me as strongly during my first read through Kingdom in 2017 now seem like revelations (Time-Poem, Semi-Retired, Ronnie).
Just two selections from the longer piece that closes Blue Rust and really grabbed me:
Don't be afraid to go sailing out, / don't think of riptides, / storms, / huge seas / risen over the flybridge, / threads of fire, / the jaws of a wolf eel / slithering out of the trawl" (Ocean p. 82).
Thy sea is so great / and my boat so small / stamped in metal over the door-- / my thin hands gripping the shovel / and loosening dirt in the garden, / the restless claws of the ocean / turning the pebbles and rocks and sand, / tumbling the chitin and shell fragments / ceaselessly each day and night forever: / Quaternary, Cretaceous, Jurassic, Cambrian / onto the shores of this world" (Ocean p. 83).
Examples of how Millar effortlessly invokes both specific time and the immensity of ongoing time, the singular experience and the vastness within which it occurs. That's one of his work's most noteworthy qualities, and I hope people read him more.
Overtime is strongly represented. That's not surprising--to the limited extent that I know, I think that's considered his best collection. Fortune is the least represented, and it falls somewhere between the lengthy, vivid worlds painted in Overtime and the more sparse and unresolved descriptions of Blue Rust. Kingdom strikes a better balance, in my opinion--we get the vivid descriptions but end more often on a beautifully open-ended note. After reading Dark Harvest, I think I will slide Blue Rust and Kingdom back into my "to read" pile--in particular, the beauty in Blue Rust really jumped out at me this time around. So, that was a bit of an unexpected development. The new poems haven't stuck with me as much, but that might just take some time. Case in point, poems that hadn't captured me as strongly during my first read through Kingdom in 2017 now seem like revelations (Time-Poem, Semi-Retired, Ronnie).
Just two selections from the longer piece that closes Blue Rust and really grabbed me:
Don't be afraid to go sailing out, / don't think of riptides, / storms, / huge seas / risen over the flybridge, / threads of fire, / the jaws of a wolf eel / slithering out of the trawl" (Ocean p. 82).
Thy sea is so great / and my boat so small / stamped in metal over the door-- / my thin hands gripping the shovel / and loosening dirt in the garden, / the restless claws of the ocean / turning the pebbles and rocks and sand, / tumbling the chitin and shell fragments / ceaselessly each day and night forever: / Quaternary, Cretaceous, Jurassic, Cambrian / onto the shores of this world" (Ocean p. 83).
Examples of how Millar effortlessly invokes both specific time and the immensity of ongoing time, the singular experience and the vastness within which it occurs. That's one of his work's most noteworthy qualities, and I hope people read him more.
May 26, 2023
Before I got an MFA in fiction, I liked poetry enough, but mostly in that obligatory sure-I’m-sensitive-person-with-a-humanities-degree sort of way. All that changed at @pacificmfa where I learned way more from the nightly poetry readings than I ever expected to. Part of this, I admit, has to do with how the format of public readings kinda favors poetry over prose. With prose, even a Nobel Laureate reading his best work can sometimes leave me wishing I could just pick up the book and take it from there. Poetry, on the other hand, only seems to get better when read aloud to an alert room.
Joe Millar’s stuff was always my favorite. It’s the poetry of storytelling. These poems are stories of the tragic everyday set to simple music, to stomped feet and banging hammers. Listening to Millar read them out loud made me more aware than ever of all the ways a person’s voice will fall naturally into a rhythm while telling a story to a friend or loved one for the fifth or fiftieth time, how the clauses start to line up all on their own or how every adjective has at least one letter in common with the noun it modifies.
I’ll be recommending this best-of album a ton. Probably stuff a few stockings with it too. From the new poems, I especially liked “Masks” and this sequence in particular:
[…] since these are the holidays
of the pandemic
and nothing makes too much sense.
I need a lawyer to interpret my dreams
and a long train to carry the dead,
the part that’s unseen and the part
that’s unsaid
Joe Millar’s stuff was always my favorite. It’s the poetry of storytelling. These poems are stories of the tragic everyday set to simple music, to stomped feet and banging hammers. Listening to Millar read them out loud made me more aware than ever of all the ways a person’s voice will fall naturally into a rhythm while telling a story to a friend or loved one for the fifth or fiftieth time, how the clauses start to line up all on their own or how every adjective has at least one letter in common with the noun it modifies.
I’ll be recommending this best-of album a ton. Probably stuff a few stockings with it too. From the new poems, I especially liked “Masks” and this sequence in particular:
[…] since these are the holidays
of the pandemic
and nothing makes too much sense.
I need a lawyer to interpret my dreams
and a long train to carry the dead,
the part that’s unseen and the part
that’s unsaid
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews