Twilight

Joseph Millar

Sometimes I think you’d give anythingto disappear into the twilight againto walk ashore, not looking backthrough the forest’s insomniac shuffling,ravens loosening their wings in the pineswhere the dry ferns crackle under your soles.In your left hand a glass of yellow winewhich glows like a blurry lensthrough the dusky air from counties eastsmelling of burning grassand it’s not like we’re lost in these woods,having drifted through here beforefor our life together seems like a riverand your hair a world full of time and despairwhich I can’t compare to any otherits red thickness streaked with gray—you with your perfumes and me with my feathers:we were never delicate lovers.

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Joseph Millar’s poems arise from the currents of felt experience: work, love, filial connection, poems of life and death. His work has won fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. Shine is his sixth collection. He teaches in Pacific University’s low residency MFA and lives in Richmond, CA.

Cover of "Shine"
Shine
Carnegie Mellon University Press

Poems that arise from the currents of felt experience.

Joseph Millar’s lyrical poems explore work, love, filial connection, life, and death. This is Millar’s sixth collection, and it reaches a deeper, more sonic level than his usual narrative voice. A collection of half songs rendered in a hardscrabble lyricism, they are propelled by their shifting, irregular rhymes, half rhymes, and off rhymes. The poems’ subjects grow from moments of daily life and their deeper obsessions—love, work, death, desire—and the making of art itself. Touched with more humor than earlier work, and with an unpredictable timing that seems to listen to itself as it travels down the page, the poems are part wonder and part reflection, carried along by their music.

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