David Miller's Reassembling Still: A Review

'Suite', one of the first poems in the book, is indicative of the marvellous way Miller's poems refuse to add up neatly. Micro-fictions, perhaps beginnings of fictions, are set up against isolated lines, detailing specifics. We could say that many of the lines are presented without authorial comment: 'Looking through a sequence of gaps, holes.' The title 'Suite', presumably drawn from music, denotes that the sections of the poem (movements), are connected and also unconnected. In other poems the more colloquial term 'mix' is used as in 'South London Mix'. In 'Suite', as elsewhere, the quietest of dots demarcates a section has closed. The use of white space, in terms of spaces between line breaks, two line spaces in the case of 'Suite', carries the energies of a poetics that is at once joyful yet also sombre. The reader is often given a picture as if through a gauze. Miller's poetry resists allowing the sections, or even the stanzas within the sections, to connect through any logical or sequential train. Yet, at the same time, you leave poems feeling as if you have just read something with a totality about it, a feeling that parts belong together unified by mood.

I've written a review of David Miller's Collected Poems, Reassembling Still, for Stride which is also part of a mini feature also including an interview with Miller and a tribute by Rupert Loydell, Read more at Stride HERE