Canticle for Remnant Days
What a pleasure spending time with the soulful poems in Jane C. Miller’s debut collection, Canticle for Remnant Days. Miller’s work is haunted by time, by the poet’s awareness of her own mortality, and by the ache she feels when contemplating the vulnerability of those she loves—and yet, far from being pessimistic, these skillfully crafted poems are full of hope and tenderness. Like a scientist, Miller takes the measure of what she sees. Like an alchemist, she distills. And like an ecstatic, she winds it all together into a rich song of praise.
—James Arthur
In Canticle for Remnant Days, Jane C. Miller explores the complexities and difficulties of capturing “life before the after” of loving and letting go. “Why is joy so brief,” Miller asks, understanding as she does that “joys are often the shadows cast by sorrows.” In a world where “so many wishes go unmet,” Miller reminds us to “walk in the world” in ways that “make diamonds of rivets.” Despite the “handwringing of hours” we often feel, these poems still find a way to express the longings of our hearts as signs of hope.
—Michael S. Glaser, Maryland Poet Laureate, 2005-2009
“So many deer die in poems,” Jane C. Miller begins her long-awaited first collection, “I am due to hit one.” The charm in Miller’s poetry is her hard wit, and her appetite for the mess of life. In poem after poem, she invites trouble to pose for a close-up, so we can gawk and take heart. This book is full of hits.
—Diana Goetsch
“The remnant day walks with you.” With masterful attention and lyric finesse, Jane C. Miller steers us into the gambles of love, the lives we don’t sign up for, our what-ifs, the overlooks that save us. She probes the limits of memory and language with tenderness, precision and humor. These poems hit where it hurts, while lifting that hurt and the ambushes of life, the awe in our curveball world, into song.
—Tara Skurtu
Walking the Sunken Boards
In these poems, I can almost feel the farm, the Chester River, the four women there, writing themselves “into this landscape.” What a satisfying group of poems, written in both stillness and companionship! There is loss, grief, regret and a profound appreciation for what sustains us: the creatures, the livingness of the estuary, the living memories. I’m grateful that these have been collected. I’ve loved reading them.
—Fleda Brown, author of The Woods are on Fire: New & Selected Poems
Cove, river, drowned dock, love, loneliness, memory, light and light’s transformations provide amply as subject and for the imagery in the poems by the four poets represented in Walking the Sunken Boards. With distinctive voices, Blaskey, Comorat, Ingersoll and Miller write themselves and us, too, their lucky readers. All four share the good in clarity, and confidence in individual lines that from time to time are touched by notes of radiance, as if brought up from the depths or down from the night sky.
—Carol Frost, author of Entwined: Three Lyric Sequences
A remarkable collaboration from four poets who share visits to a common muse—the “brief haven” of a farmhouse in a tucked-away cove on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Here they weave worries, joys, moments and memories into testaments of rising and staying afloat through changing tides. Each, a singular voice in a larger chorus that includes not only fellow poets but the bullfrog and heron, deer, snakes, geese and foxes that cohabit the cove. Truly inspired—and inspirational—work.
—Meredith Davies Hadaway, author of At the Narrows
The Broadkill Review
James Bourey reviews Canticle For Remnant Days, Poems By Jane C. Miller
Updated: Apr 29, 2024
Poems
By Jane C. Miller
Pond Road Press 2024, $18
Full disclosure: I have known Jane Miller for several years, beginning with the Delaware Writers Retreat in Lewes in 2014.
Canticle For Remnant Days is Jane C. Miller’s first full length collection of poems. From the title one might think this is a weighty, scholarly stack of work. And in some ways that is true. The poems do carry weight – emotional, layered, thoughtfully composed, revelatory work that has been carefully arranged into four sections. But the poetry here does not carry the obfuscations of academic jargon or unreachable understanding.
These sixty-one poems punch the gut, bring a deeper awareness of the shared experiences of the human condition, cause laughter in unexpected places, and finely sketch images that stick in the reader’s mind for a long time. There are poems about childhood, about growing up and moving on, about marriage and friendship and love. And there are examinations of social issues and even a little bit of History. Ms. Miller is obviously a widely read and careful observer who can find new ways of approaching some familiar themes.
Consider the opening poem, Heading West on I-80, a road poem that begins with this line: So many deer die in poems, I am due/ to hit one. From that arresting thought the author moves through a few lines that establish her situation. Then observing a deer she writes Her white tail dismisses/ a gossip of flies. Doesn’t she know/ someone is always out for blood, men…and then moves to the view of big-rig trucks descending a hill on to the penultimate couplet where the poem makes a sudden turn …Once our hands so hungry/ we filled them with each other in the dark--/ and then the final separated line darkness, tunnels ahead, ash where light hits. In nine couplets and a strong last line we are introduced to a traveling narrator, find an interesting natural metaphor in the deer, swing back to the road with another way of describing her journey through the movement and sound of a tractor trailer, to an ending – an ending offering imaginable possibilities. The flow of these lines and the constant shifting of views in this poem is an apt introduction to the distinct style and voice of this poet.
Miller’s skill at giving us opening lines that draw us into poems is admirable. And the subsequent poems never disappoint us, which lead us to move, with anticipation, onto the next piece. Opening lines like See the rickety house, the mosquito-fed lake... in Summer Stock. Or - I palm a rock, its torso/ creviced between breasts in At a Workshop on Grief. Or Let poems fly willing as sonar/ to the cave of you in If James Wright Came Back. The titles and opening lines in this volume are alluring and full of deft craft, pulling us into the magic of poems that show us universal experiences and ideas through personal revelations.
Each part of this collection stands alone, yet the poems are woven into a quilt of experience that tells a bigger story. And there’s enough entertainment in these pages to draw the reader back again and again, always finding something new to think about. I highly recommend this fine book.
James Bourey is a poet, writer, and occasional reviewer.
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