Darkening the Grass

In this new and moving collection, Michael Miller, with a clarity of focus, probes the subjects of marriage, love, war, and growing older.  Through the interweaving themes, driven by necessity, he creates a tapestry of characters, incidents, and the human dilemma that is both personal and universal.  These poems, in language clear and lyrical, attest to the triumph of the human spirit over adversity.

Michael Mill‘s Darkening the Grass (2012) is the third book by an accomplished American poet who is in his eighth decade. The Joyful Dark, his first book, was the “Editor’s Choice” winner of the McGovern Prize at Ashland Poetry Press.  His poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, The American Scholar, The New Republic, Raritan, The Southern Review, The Yale Review and other publications. Born in New York City in 1940, he now lives in Massachusetts.

I read Michael Miller’s poems with great pleasure in their accurate seeing, their assured phrasing, their true and proportionate feeling. — Richard Wilbur

No other poet I know writes so beautifully about seasoned love–love within the context of a life-long marriage.  In writing about people and the places they share, Michael Miller achieves in his poems a deep sense of emotional integrity.  His poems value clarity, understatement, love in the context of its turbulence, and the accuracy of each detail.  As a man living in his eighth decade, as a man long married, and as a former Marine, Miller is a poet of the present tense.  In his poems, in every present moment, informing one another, death and the possibilities for love tangle around each other.
— Stephen Haven

October 2012
92 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
978-1-933880-32-7