Paper Banners

Jane Miller

A herald of desire, suffering, mortality, and the mission of poetry itself, Jane Miller’s Paper Banners “say[s] the cosmos / isn’t hostile. / Yet strangles a dove / with one hand.” Against this angst, Miller steps outside of history to contemplate voices of love, aging, and artmaking. Many poems are addressed to family members, friends, and young poets, or pay homage to familiar figures taken by time or tragedy, including Virginia Woolf, Osip Mandelstam, and the Song Dynasty poet Li Qingzhao. In clear, short lines, these poems harken to ancient banderoles, or pennants, which announced rallying cries on the lances of knights and mottoes on the flags of ships. Here, Miller’s Paper Banners is made of images of the American Southwest and scrutinizes its political and physical landscape. Like skywriting streamed in white smoke, this collection bears its message on the wind, its words addressed to anyone. As Miller catalogues the intimate experiences that make up a life—friendships, loves, dreams, our human connection to the environment—Paper Banners becomes a hope that “what will survive of us is love.”

Paperback: $17.00 list price

Bookshop Amazon
Receive this book as a gift when you donate.

ISBN: 9781556596735

Format: Paperback

MEADOW WITH STANDING CROWS

After living in the sprouting desert there is nothing
I’d prefer more than the thought
of sweet rain falling into a salty bay.
Rather than bare the farthest touch,
rather than be rain, having been
neither of this world nor mad as it turns
out, on and off during a year
I saw someone had bitten your neck near the baby
hair, and also your shoulder. Why does it show,
is it of the heart, is it mindless, jealousy,
where nothing moves in a field in a world, and it is morning?
Even though you never came after me
all summer, nor called, not once
when I said not to, like finally
stepping over water after contemplation of it
as sand, two crows in the moans of the shallows
in my head answer for whom are we mysterious
and suffering, for loveliness.

About the Author

Jane Miller has written twelve books, most recently Who Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions, and including Working Time: Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Travel. She has performed her creative work and lectured on literature and the fine arts at universities, colleges, libraries, community centers, and public arts venues for over thirty years. She is the recipient of a Wallace Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Western States Book Award, and the Audre …

Read more

Reviews

“Excellent . . . Miller is able to go inside her subjects and draw readers with her. That experience makes this collection one for all libraries.”—Diane Scharper, Publishers Weekly, STARRED review