Page last updated: February 21, 2020

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LIFELINES

Poems by Michael Miller

In these poems focused on the intricacies of love, family, self-awareness, and the cracks between dreams and waking life, Michael Miller continues to show his mastery of the human voice and heart, “the known leading to the unknown.”

White Cane

One eye gone, the other a bare lifeline

To vision, he moves through a world

Of shadows, blurs, no longer

The middle-aged man assembling

His day with precision.

Each morning he practices the walk to town,

His white cane leading the way,

The metal tip tattooing the sidewalk.

At the corner, he feels my presence,

Asks clearly if he can take my hand,

Then grips my forearm, his fingers

A human vise I do not wish to pry open.

“I read Michael Miller’s poems with great pleasure in their accurate seeing, their assured phrasing, their true and proportionate feeling.”—RICHARD WILBUR

May 31, 2014 A Word’s Worth Review: “The poems probe the serious subject of mortality, love, marriage, and family, touching on the truth with good-humored intensity and expressing wisdom gained from past losses, as well as resilience in the face of fierce fear. ...” Read the Full Review

April, 2014, Yeats Poetry Prize Winner:

Miller won 1st Place for his poem, “The Different War” (which was also a finalist for the T.S. Eliot Prize.” Awarded by the Yeats Society, Judge Jessica Greenbaum said: “The internalization of war superimposes itself on the physical gestures of this veteran’s daily life, so that while lifting his son from the sandbox he replays his rescue of a war buddy ...” Learn More

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Pinyon Titles

ALSO BY MICHAEL MILLER:

Into This World (2013): Finely tuned meditations on war, nature, friends, love; cycles of light and dark, fear and hope. One must climb to get to the light; certainty is uncertain.

“No other poet I know writes so beautifully about seasoned love. His poems value clarity, understatement, love in the context of its turbulence, and the accuracy of each detail.”—Stephen Haven

(6"x9" paperback, 88 pages, ISBN: 978-1-936671-14-4, $16.00).

In the Mirror (2016): “I read Michael Miller’s poems with great pleasure in their accurate seeing, their assured phrasing, their true and proportionate feeling.”—Richard Wilbur

(6"x9" paperback, 80 pages, ISBN: 978-1-936671-39-7, $16.00).

Waking in the Dark (2019): Michael Miller’s poems focus on the intimacies and complexities of love, family, waking life, and “the space between dreams.” He continues to show in another insightful book his mastery of the human voice and heart.

(6"x9" paperback, 80 pages, ISBN: 978-1-936671-39-7, $16.00).

Entering the Day (2020): “She remembered the birds singing / In Greek, the plane trees with / Asymmetrical windows opened wide / Between their bare branches,/ The secrets she looked for in / Her father’s beard.” (from “Virginia”)

(6"x9" paperback, 80 pages, ISBN: 978-1-936671-63-2, $16.00).