Stone Being, Poems by Peggy Miller
Peggy Miller's Stone Being combines an elemental physicality with the most searching spirituality: "stone being where we all began."
"These poems, this life, plotted against the substance of dark matter, dendrites ‘sweeping from here to the outer reaches,’ absolve the loneliness of human life. The narrator is joined to all that exists, ‘borrowing fabric from time and wood and air,/ her mind waving out through/ the great cosmic blend.’ That beautiful consolation. The poetry extends thought: ‘I understand identity by its borders,’ the poet tells us. Yet ‘a newborn has not settled/ into her delimitations// and her death.’ In a sense, the poet’s work is like that, consciousness spreading out beyond the boundaries and limitations of her own skin and body, ranging far into the universe or into the hearts of the world. Stone Being is guided by its briefer poems, shards, the poet tells us. In one, we find a blending—’dark limbs of oak vein the sky like spreading hands—/arteries and branches trace an affinity—blood vessels,/ lightning, trees’ postures, coursing of rivers,/ each neuron’s thousand dendrites reaching’. The reader will find deep intelligence in these poems, and an exploration of human love and loss painted across a vast landscape." —Myra Sklarew
"Following two chapbooks and her dazzling debut volume, What the Blood Knows, Peggy Miller gives us a strikingly somber and sobering poetry that mixes fresh, wild grief with an awareness of cosmic teleology. Here, in Stone Being, the concerns are elemental, in every sense of the word. The poet has a mind ‘in step with stars,’ and she brings it to bear on questions of existence, consciousness, connection, and eschatology. As is inevitable with any book about last things, the mood is autumnal, but it is not without wit. There are poems here that belong in anthologies: ‘Needing Water,’ ‘To That Eye,’ others. In one brief poem about mind and body, Miller writes, ‘I ask the separate body where I am. / Get in the car, she says. It’s raining.’ Can you get any more brilliant?"—Kelly Cherry, author of Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems.
“Peggy Miller's new collection, takes its title from one of her lines, I was wrong, of course, stone being where we all began though few remember what it was like. The book rummages through the cosmos for justification of the human struggle. In ‘Cuckoo’ she writes, Over and over my breath will comfort me, and yet elsewhere and without contradiction she claims, Indeed it is the air that atrophies my clutches. But it isn't all grief here. ‘Palimpsest’ traces the way creativity holds hands with things outside oneself. Stone Being sees the world from the unique cosmic perspective that defines Miller's poetry.”--Denise Duhamel
Peggy Miller is an associate editor with The Comstock Review, and leads poetry workshops. She has an MFA from American University. She is author of the chapbook Martha Contemplates the Universe, Frith Press, and a Greatest Hits chapbook from Pudding House, as well as What the Blood Knows, CW Books 2007. Her poems have appeared in Valparaiso, Karamu, Connecticut River Review, Lip Service, The Listening Eye, Lucid Stone and elsewhere. Miller made her career in weed science research. She lives in The Villages, FL.
ISBN-13: 978-1934999615, 92 pages, $18.00