Late Inscriptions continues David Miller's elegiac project of recent years: themes of loss pared down to deceptive simplicity; snatches of memory balanced against paradox. The too-overlooked American poet Robert Lax shadows these poems. Miller shares Lax's ambition to 'do it with the simplest elements', shares his influences from abstract art (Miller is himself an accomplished abstract painter), and his short, sometimes single-word line. In these poems pathos, in the ancient Greek sense of 'suffering' or 'what befalls one', is doubled in the address to both reader and lost love. This is not some universalised sentiment: it is specific, and specific to us. No other contemporary poet does this so skilfully, or with such honesty.
- Keith Jebb
A bird lands on the door, waiting to be fed. A dog enters the bedroom through an open back door. Wedding cake, Belgian waffles and eggs Florentine are shared with old friends. Buildings shatter and collapse. Sparely rendered, Late Inscriptions weaves together such images, memories coloured by grief. The result is a tenderly fragmented meditation on love and loss.
'To speak -
to not speak -
to write -
through - and out -'
- Harriet Neville