Joseph Millar
Poetry
Poetry
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JOSEPH MILLAR'S first collection, Overtime (2001) was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. A second collection, Fortune, appeared in 2007. Millar grew up in Pennsylvania and attended Johns Hopkins University and spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay area working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. It would be two decades before he returned to poetry. His poems --stark, clean, unsparing-- record the narrative of a life fully lived among fathers, sons, brothers, daughters, weddings and divorce, men and women.
His work has won a fellowship for the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2008 Pushcart Prize and has appeared in such magazines as DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, APR, and Ploughshares. In 1997, he gave up his job as telephone installation foreman to try his hand at teaching. A new chapbook, Bestiary, is now available from Red Dragonfly Press, and a third collection, Blue Rust, will be published by Carnegie-Mellon in fall 2011. Millar is now core faculty at Pacific University's Low Residency MFA Program and lives in Raleigh, NC with his wife, the poet Dorianne Laux.
All year they’ve given things away:
lipsticks, stockings, movie tickets,
wiper blades and cigarette money.
At dawn they stand over our sleeping bodies
gazing into our faces, into the future.
Then they stay outdoors after dinner
smoking, watching the road turn dark
and they don’t want to come back inside.
Ten thousand of them have rested later
under a gray coat still wet with rain
in their belt buckles and reading glasses,
their hatbands and tobacco smells.
When they fall asleep
night collects in their palms,
miles of track turn bright with dew
and a net of stars rises
over the river. They hear a voice
asking for order, asking for quiet
while the world tilts away from the sun
and the shadows grow long at the end of fall
over the wisps and stubble,
over the dust and chaff.
His work has won a fellowship for the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2008 Pushcart Prize and has appeared in such magazines as DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, APR, and Ploughshares. In 1997, he gave up his job as telephone installation foreman to try his hand at teaching. A new chapbook, Bestiary, is now available from Red Dragonfly Press, and a third collection, Blue Rust, will be published by Carnegie-Mellon in fall 2011. Millar is now core faculty at Pacific University's Low Residency MFA Program and lives in Raleigh, NC with his wife, the poet Dorianne Laux.
Poems of the Month
FATHERS
All year they’ve given things away:
lipsticks, stockings, movie tickets,
wiper blades and cigarette money.
At dawn they stand over our sleeping bodies
gazing into our faces, into the future.
Then they stay outdoors after dinner
smoking, watching the road turn dark
and they don’t want to come back inside.
Ten thousand of them have rested later
under a gray coat still wet with rain
in their belt buckles and reading glasses,
their hatbands and tobacco smells.
When they fall asleep
night collects in their palms,
miles of track turn bright with dew
and a net of stars rises
over the river. They hear a voice
asking for order, asking for quiet
while the world tilts away from the sun
and the shadows grow long at the end of fall
over the wisps and stubble,
over the dust and chaff.
-from Fortune
LYRICAL
The spaniel next door yaps at the sparrows,
he yaps at the crows and the mailman,
yaps at the compost pile and the sunflower,
yaps at the rain and the sky. He yaps
at the steps leading down to the creek
where the flax plants bloom high as my waist
and the blue flowers force their way up
through small stones the color of night. He
yaps at the garbage truck's back-up beeper,
iron bell song of the priest and bridegroom,
song of the lone ship, song of the train,
song of the big waves rolling and breaking
over the western reefs. He yaps at the rosebush,
yaps at the fence, song for the sidewalk cracked
in half, the wine bottle resting against the curb,
the neighbor who doesn't come home.
he yaps at the crows and the mailman,
yaps at the compost pile and the sunflower,
yaps at the rain and the sky. He yaps
at the steps leading down to the creek
where the flax plants bloom high as my waist
and the blue flowers force their way up
through small stones the color of night. He
yaps at the garbage truck's back-up beeper,
iron bell song of the priest and bridegroom,
song of the lone ship, song of the train,
song of the big waves rolling and breaking
over the western reefs. He yaps at the rosebush,
yaps at the fence, song for the sidewalk cracked
in half, the wine bottle resting against the curb,
the neighbor who doesn't come home.
-from Fortune