Light, Moving

Poetry. In her second full-length poetry collection, Carolyn Miller visits light in each season of nature and of life, revealing shifting states of joy and grief, aging and beauty. Her unpresumptuous voice is as richly textured as the landscape she invokes, a remarkable landscape of the remembered and the present that she rediscovers in the gardens of San Francisco, the woods of Missouri, in each place she visits as she travels farther from home and from childhood. From the holiness of dishwater and the worship of dirt, through storms in the world and the body, from the irreversible parting of Persephone from her mother to the repair of the spirit in the suddenness of a downpour or the landing of a plane, Miller gives us "Each moment palpable / as a berry, life and death joined at the core, / the flower against the bone."