The Waters of Marah: Selected Prose 1973-1995 by David Miller

Singing Horse Press

2003

Reviewed by Kevin Fitzgerald

The generalization that British poetry lost step with American poetry after World War II has circulated for some time now. According to conventional wisdom British poetry lost step because it was less willing than American poetry to break with traditional verse forms and conventions and experiment with language. This gross generalization has caused widespread ignorance in America of current happenings in British poetry. British journals with an American readership, like the Time Literary Supplement, only increase the currency of such stereotypes when they poke fun at experimental lines by American poets like John Yau and Ethan Paquin, as TLS has done recently. Most of the recent American books that explore this state of affairs begin by measuring the neglect and cultural divide. In Fishing By Obstinate Isles, Keith Tuma offers the glum prognosis, “In the United States, British poetry is dead.” Likewise Dana Gioia’s Barrier of a Common Language points out that, “Poetic reputations seldom cross the Atlantic.”

Yet considering the shared modernist history, British poetry remains of vital importance to America. And British poets influenced by Pound’s modernism and its descendents, like Basil Bunting, deserve more attention for their innovations. David Miller is such a poet. Although Miller isn’t British in the narrowest sense—he was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1950—he has lived in London since 1972. Over the last 25 years his work has received in his own words, “pockets of informed response” from places in America like Providence, where the Waldrops’ seminal Burning Deck Press published several of his books. Nonetheless Miller’s work has yet to receive the same kind of stateside recognition that Cambridge poets Tom Raworth and Jeremy Prynne have received. Miller’s new book, The Waters of Marah, will help rectify this situation. Spanning over 20 years, from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, this work collects a selection of “poems in prose” from nine of Miller’s previously published books, some of which are now out of print. As such this book operates as a companion to Miller’s Collected Poems, which was published in 1997 and collected his poetry from roughly the same time period.

Fleeting observations, recollections, and meditations comprise the bedrock over which The Waters of Marah travels. Although it brings together prose poems from different books and time periods, the collection as a whole displays a unified aesthetic, one dominated in part by montage. Miller assembles his disparate materials in such a way that the individual segments lack obvious connection. Through this Miller seeks to disrupt familiar or conventional associations between things. He seeks to overwhelm the analytical capacities of the reader and create “resonances” between the segments “of something that’s never stated and can’t be stated.” These gaps of meaning prevent the reader from achieving a sense of preordained closure. The reader instead “reads” the poem by tapping into hidden links or resonances.

The Waters of Marah begins with the longish work entitled “South London Mix.” This prose poem was one of Miller’s first books and reflects his initial experiences in London. The title derives from assemblages of John Cage’s, such as “Fontana Mix” and “Williams Mix,” though Miller doesn’t use chance. In most respects the aesthetic at play in the poem resembles the rest of the mixed genre work in the collection. It is a montage of mostly narrative prose fragments interspersed with occasional verse and quotes from various sources, from Chaucer to Celan. “South London Mix,” however, features the extra ingredient of verbal experimentation. For example, Miller writes, “Was. Game. One. Inconsequential rules, and. Tea.” This sort of paratactic linguistic experiment reflects the influence of the American poet Robert Lax, whose work took minimalist and abstract artist of the Sixties, like Ad Reinhardt, as its model.

“South London Mix” also reflects Miller’s attempts at using simple nouns and verbs “to reassert the value…of ordinary things.” Miller does this through the use of unadorned and distilled prose. Take for example these two segments, which in effect outline and then enact Miller’s task:

The task is not even to get a sense of mystery into commonplace things again. I think the job is to reassert the value (and value is not mysterious exactly, nor magical, but intangible), of ordinary things. And in doing so, find the place where tangible and intangible meet, and concrete and abstract do likewise.

Again, about simple things: someone once said that a certain line in a poem of mine, ‘Briar-Cup,’ was very beautiful. The line was: Birds flew over the river.

.

The wind moves the door a little. It opens onto the lower staircase, leading to the entranceway. The lock of the door is a square of worn black interrupted by rust-marks; the handle is of brown wood, blackened at the top, with a few specks of white paint. The door was once, I guess, painted white or light gray, but this has been sandpapered down to a milky haze, irregular, over the pale brown wood. I listen to music (Jobim). I want to say something about attention.

Perhaps one of the most noticeable and distinct aspects of Miller’s work is its reliance on distilled and descriptive prose that rhythmically adheres to the spoken word. The first segment above refers to a poem that appeared in Miller’s first poetry book, The Caryatids, a book influenced by Objectivist concision and sincerity of vision. The second segment then proceeds to in effect realize Miller’s post-Objectivist goal of converting words into things with the value of everyday tangible objects. Miller does this through his focused attention to the room’s still life.

It could be that the focused attention of “South London Mix” partly reflects the fact that Miller had only recently arrived in London. Even the smallest of details have a way of standing out when one finds oneself in new surroundings. It’s more likely, however, that Miller’s focused attention stems from his interest in the epiphany. In W. H. Hudson and the Elusive Paradise, his published doctoral dissertation, Miller contends that close attention to the particulars of the visible world can lead to epiphany. When considered in light of Miller’s poetry, this approach reveals a spiritual dimension to post-Objectivist attention that perhaps always existed but needed a poet like Miller to fully emphasize and explore.

Another distinct aspect of Miller’s work is its calm and emotionally modulated tone. At times the tone seems distant, removed, meditative and reserved, as if washed clean of excessive emotion. The large amount of space between the segments (which is repeated throughout the book) adds to the work’s calm sobriety. Even “South London Mix”—a poem written around the time of Miller’s move to London, when he made his living through unskilled labor—carries mostly a calm and almost Buddhist tone that lacks unsettled urgency.

But Miller does at times interrupt his descriptive still life with sudden and piercing glimpses into the core of a relationship or an event. A meeting between lovers ends in a vicious quarrel and breakup. A meandering dream concludes in death. A forest suddenly breaks through the floor during a concert. Segments where Miller’s attention turns in such a manner particularly stand out given the work’s overall calm meditative air. Another example finds Miller wandering the streets “sick with a dull tired anger” after discovering “betrayal” hidden underneath charming and polite conversation. “I didn’t want to let go of that quietness, that kindness, those people,” he writes. “And I was sick with my own desire, my innocence, my own hurt and bitterness.” Despite its incisive and almost raw quality, this narrative fragment lacks concrete particulars like proper names or a setting. Miller does this throughout his work. Identities are almost always indicated with common nouns or pronouns, as in “the painter” and “he” in “The Stomata.” And the situation is left unresolved. This irresolution and lack of identity, coupled with the overall meditative calm of the work, makes the particularity of the story fade to a certain extent into the background. The suddenness of the situation becomes less insistent, more mysterious, and the reader is left to meditate on the core essence of a human situation, a reality perhaps not that unlike the concrete things of Miller’s focus elsewhere.

Of course Miller doesn’t limit his attention only to bitter relationships or sudden events. One of the brief verse segments intersperses in “South London Mix” focuses on friendship:

The easy thing: friends

care for nothing that has to be

ripped from the other, the hard

answer, the demand

that truth be the hawk’s truth.

Not the “long haul”, and not the flash

of awakening, the rise of ecstasy:

but / a shared and gradual

intimacy.

Only “Tesserae,” the last selection in The Waters of Marah, differs in form from the rest of the prose poems in the book. This work uses elements more common to fiction, though it too refrains from closure. “Tesserae” opens with Charles hardly able sleep, “shaken through a sieve of memories” caused by the disappearance of his friend, Stephen. The narrative then recounts Charles’ relationship to Stephen and their circle of acquaintances. But “Tesserae” ultimately strays from traditional plotting and leaves Stephen's disappearance unexplained.

The tendency in Miller’s work to leave things unresolved stems in part from his interest in what he calls an “aesthetics of disclosure” over an “aesthetics of style.” By “disclosure,” Miller means the writer should avoid closure and investigate the unknown and uncertain rather than the known and definitive. Miller’s interest in disclosure and uncertainty comes in part from the influence of Robert Lax. Lax was a life-long friend of Thomas Merton (they met in college), and he eventually moved to the Greek island of Patmos for solitude. Lax believed that poetry is a spiritual art that can be used to transcend the self, though he was also interested in how this transcendence related to the darkness of uncertainty. While Miller does not consider himself a religious poet, his work takes its cue from Lax and places great emphasis upon uncertainty and unknowing. “Faith is important to me as a poet,” said Miller, “in as much as it relates to doubt and uncertainty.” Miller is specifically interested in the suspension of rational certainty that occurs in certain mystical traditions as a route to belief, though his work doesn’t convey allegiance to a particular ideology or belief system.

One of the few references to a spiritual tradition in the book is actually its title. In Exodus the Israelites name a body of water “Marah” because its waters are too bitter to drink. Only through the mystery of a miracle does the water become sweet and potable. While it certainly does not take a miracle for readers to appreciate Miller’s understated art, perhaps some will initially undervalue its apparent calm. It might taste bitter to the tongue accustom to flashy linguistic pyrotechnics. Patient readers, however, will find that Miller’s voice accumulates a deeply calming and reassuring resonance grounded in attentiveness to the solid “thingness” of existence. They will recognize Miller’s innovative application of post-Objectivist sincerity to the prose poem, which he bends into a form far more inclusive than the traditional prose poem. Patient readers attuned to nuance will not regret navigating The Waters of Marah. Although these waters mingle descriptive clarity with the murkiness of uncertainty, and overflow all attempts at closure, they revalue the certainty of things and human relationship, and thereby deepen our attention to the plain brilliance of existence.