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Poems that sift and
resift the lessons of perception, of "raw" experience, but
in order
to open them into more complex compounds of vision, emotion and thought.
Webs of
vivid epiphanies probe the human story and the sensuous worldwith
the aim of defining
just what it means to be alive, and think.
David Miller was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1950 and has lived
in London since
1972. A book of interviews and articles on his work, At the Heart
of Things, was been
published by Stride in 1994.
"Connectivity between world and language stands at the center
of Stromata, but words
do not necessarily pre-empt the physical realm so much as preserve
some of its rapidly
disappearing facets.... Miller's is a kind of poesie noire, an urban
poetry of shadows and
glimpses, street lamps and whispers. The crucial relationship beween
word and life is
ultimately mysterious, inimitable and unknowable, yet its existence
surfaces most
convincingly in the poem, the made object.... Each of these demanding
books sustains
a life of its own, one that readers can share."
--Fred Muratori, American Book Review
"...engages the reader's sense of narrative
inevitability.... Miller heightens the ambiguity
in each thought, line, and image so that they glide together in non-hierarchical,
energetic
ways."
--Susan Smith Nash, Witz
"David Miller searches for the ineffable, for indices of
being (not W.C.Williams' 'ideas')
among things. He is phenomenologist rather than semiotician. The codes
are to be broken
(apart) rather than decoded, since we cannot know what it was that
was encoded in the
first price.... Miller has absorbed the aesthetics of the Objectivists
and is one of the few
to hive adopted this without turning it into a national pastoralism
of flower poems or
delicate transcriptions of inconsequential occurrences."
--Robert Sheppard
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