Kingdom by Joseph Millar
Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2017
Joseph Millar brings the reader in close in his newest collection, Kingdom. Millar’s poems need to be heard; these deeply lyrical poems are wonderful on the ear and delightful to read aloud. He writes in the gorgeous “Southern Exposure,”
Bring me your silent lake in the woods
and your field of harvested grainwith some rich man’s horse pastured nearby,
its eye pearlescent, its tangled mane.
This poem weaves assonance with rhyme, and the images themselves resonate with sound:
Sometimes the blues moans like a prayer
and sometimes it spits out a curseand even if you can’t see all the scars
you can tell if something hurts.
In this poem as in many others, Millar uses direct address. He is in conversation with the world, allowing the reader to see and hear his internal dialogue. “No one will tell me/where the horses have gone,” he says in “Time-Poem.” His tone is one of wonder as he surveys a scene marked by time: “It’s two in the morning on the coast/of the moon, but here it’s just midnight.” The poem takes us to a new time in the same place. He is a keen observer of the world, conveying both bewilderment and amazement:
better than sleeping,
better than gin
with the immense heaven far overhead
the color of lead or beaten tin.
He writes of watching women walking together, seen through a glass door. Millar captures these small moments and weaves them together to reflect on finding wonder.
Millar’s poems often have a wistful, nostalgic quality that he renders with specificity of detail and repetition of a phrase or word. In the poem “Ancestral,” he opens with “Sometimes the bent ghost of my father / holding a dead Pall Mall in its teeth / walks the sandy track to the beach.” We hear the lyricism, the assonance, the rugged imagery, and the wit of Millar: the cigarette is what is dead. In this last section, we see how he uses repetition to expand and exquisite detail to conclude the poem with laser focus:
I like to write with the space pen
given to me by a friend,
the same one the astronauts use.
I fall asleep with the milky way
wrapped around my shoulders.
I like the burned methane clouds
and the black threads of iron
sunk deep in the stars, and the earth
where it’s sometimes cast into bells—
bells of evening, bells of death,
bells of some ruthless joy—
iron that floats like salt in the bloodstream,
plasma inheritance, proteins and enzymes,
two million red cells every second
born in the body’s jubilant fire,
the deep cells of the marrow.
There is a gentleness to these poems, even when considering failure, “this soft body that consumes everything.” These poems are full of wonder, full of “bells of evening,” and full of quiet, ruthless joy.
Michele Bombardier is the author of What We Do (Aldrich Press, 2018), and her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Poetry International online, and many others. She earned her MFA in poetry at Pacific University and is the founder of Fishplatepoetry, offering workshops and retreats for writers while raising money for humanitarian relief.