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If I Had Wheels or Love: Collected Poems of Vassar Miller

par Vassar Miller

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Presents the complete texts of the author's eight volumes of poetry together with a sampling of previously uncollected poems.
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I first encountered Vassar Miller's name in Larry McMurtry's infamous "Ever a Bridegroom" essay, originally printed in 1981 in the Texas Observer. At the end of a fascinatingly cantankerous litany consisting of the consignment of one Texas author after another into the dustbin of history, he finds one author worthy of real merit: "Adam's Footprint was published in 1956, and from that time until rather recently Miller has been the one poet of genuine distinction in the state. I think it no hyperbole to suggest that her dozen best poems will outlast all the books mentioned in this essay, plus the 50 on A.C. Greene's list as well. That she is to this day little-known, read or praised in Texas is the most damning comment possible on our literary culture. She works in the hardest form - the lyric poem, the form where the percentage of failure is inevitably highest. Many of hers do fail, of course, but the ones which succeed come as close as any writing done in Texas to achieving what can fairly be called excellence: the product of a high gift wedded to long-sustained and exceedingly rigorous application." 1981 was a long time ago in Texas letters, but he's absolutely right about both her poetic gifts, and the interesting ways that two very similar poems (this complete collection of her works contains many near-twins of content and form) can either fail or succeed based on small artistic decisions.

I wouldn't really consider myself a "poetry guy", even though I do appreciate poets like Robinson Jeffers, and I definitely enjoy good lines in "normal" prose/journalism and well-written lyrics, which are after all essentially poetry set to music. Something about the art form seems to set it off from journalism or fiction writing, and even most writers seem to observe an invisible distinction; somehow I don't think introducing yourself as a "poet" to someone would have the same cachet as a "writer" or even a "journalist". Regardless, though Miller's work definitely stands out from the pack, it's not because of the medium she chose, it's her voice. Born in Houston, she was afflicted with cerebral palsy, which casts a huge shadow over many of the works here in addition to her other themes: loneliness, unfulfillment, nature, children, and above all, religion. I was raised Catholic though I'm not religious, and I'm inclined to be somewhat patronizing about a lot of the more treacly Christian poetry you see out there, grinning "inspirational" knockoffs of that 1 Corinthians passage about love and the like. Do not expect anything of the sort here; it would be a huge mistake to relegate her stuff to the Precious Moments pile.

Instead, she traffics in the far more difficult side of religious belief. You know: doubt, anguish, fear, weakness, pain. All that stuff that us enlightened secular folk have evolved past, right? Rather than clumsily attempt to convey her take on faith, here's "Reverent Impiety":

"I will not fast, for I have fasted longer
Than forty days and known a leaner Lent
Than can be kept with ceremonial hunger,
Since life's a lengthier season to repent
Than the brief time when spring's first winds may tease
The ashes on the brow, when bird songs intercept
The misereres chanted on our knees,
And ritual tears that I such hours have wept
Mirror a double and a muddy vision
That would not win a blessing from a priest.
Hence, purity born from my pain's precision
Refuses here to fast upon a feast,
Glutted till now on sacraments of air,
Memorials to loves that never were."

I won't pretend to undertake a rigorous formal analysis of the poem other than to pat myself on the back for managing to recognize that it's a typical 14 line Shakespearean sonnet. But it's an interestingly idiosyncratic take on the concept of Lent and its relationship to a lifetime of pain. She's very good at taking common nature imagery that by all rights should have had the juice sucked out of them eons ago - clouds, the sun, trees, stones, etc. - and finding new ways to look at them, discovering extra-ordinary aspects in the ordinary debris of regular life. Her less successful poems are usually the ones where she ends up trapped by her rhyme scheme or some other formal stricture that constrains her talent for expression; her poems are revealed to be mere arrangements of words instead of tools of sentiment. An example is "The Ghostly Beast", whose simple AABB rhyme scheme just can't carry the full weight of her theme:

"My broken bones cry out for love
To bind me tighter than a glove,
Whereas I scarcely feel your hand
Bestowing what my bones demand.

I have no origin nor end
Within your heart's deep night unpenned;
You pick me up to set me down
Where I in seas of freedom drown.

Your weight withdrawn weighs burdensome
Upon my flesh till I become
The interval between two breaths,
A life lived out in little deaths.

Your airy fingers rub me raw
More than wolf's fang or tiger's claw;
The shadows of your passing rip
Skin from my body like a whip.

Distilling dew into a wine,
You make me grosser than a swine;
You feast me on platonic fare
Until I turn into a bear.

Though my protest may be no crisper
In your dominions than a whisper,
In rhymes like catapulted stones
My love cries out for broken bones."

One of her poems that will stick with me for a while is called "Bout With Burning":

"I have tossed hours upon the tides of fever,
Upon the billows of my blood have ridden,
Where fish of fancy teem as neither river
Nor ocean spawns from India to Sweden.
Here while my boat of body burnt has drifted
Along her sides crawled tentacles of crabs
Sliming her timbers; on the waves upwafted
Crept water rats to gnaw her ropes and ribs.
Crashing, she has dived, her portholes choking
With weed and ooze, the swirls of black and green
Gulping her inch by inch, the seagulls' shrieking
Sieved depth through depth to silence. Till blast-blown,
I in my wreck beyond storm's charge and churning
Have waked marooned upon the coasts of morning.

Anyone who's been sick through the night will know exactly what it's like to wake up "marooned upon the coasts of morning". Brilliant phrase.

A factor that reduced my enjoyment of this collection, which contains all 10 of her published poetry volumes, is that Miller was obsessed by a few idée fixes and in consequence trying to read the book straight through becomes difficult after a while. Many of these poems stand proudly on their own; however, many others blur together to the point where each individual work becomes just another tree in the forest or, to use a Miller-ish metaphor, another cross on the hill. It's not really her fault, but probably this collection would seem stronger if it were slowly savored over weeks or months instead of days. I wouldn't go quite as far as McMurtry in touting her merits - not only has Texas literature changed quite a bit in 30 years, but Miller seems sadly even less known now than when he wrote - but he was right to draw attention to her, and hopefully others will continue to carry the torch. ( )
  aaronarnold | May 11, 2021 |
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Presents the complete texts of the author's eight volumes of poetry together with a sampling of previously uncollected poems.

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