Only the Senses Sleep

Award-winning poet Wayne Miller presents Only the Senses Sleep, a compilation of free-verse poems revolving around the theme of night. From the quiet that pervades a nighttime apartment to silent snowfalls and the ferocity of an ice storm, Only the Senses Sleep sublimely captures a wide range of environmental experiences in the dark that pervade the corners of human consciousness. "November Wind": Immured here / by infinitely minute and endlessly exact details - // Air ink-rolls the water, where far off / a trawler's anchored by a cloudlike net. // A curtain blows through a window, / gray (damp) along the bottom lace. // Cars in the street like hollowed cells, / their passengers naming certain stops // arrivals. To name these arrivals - / a ship, a curtain a face - your soul trailing // like a net. The ice wind cuts through. / Yes, to speak it now, and thus absolve it // like a read word. Or else there's no wind, / just the whipping of your shirt.

Wayne Miller's poems, with steady voice, concise language, distinct images and a nuanced sense of poetic tradition, gives the reader clarity without sacrificing depth. The reader is always spoken to in a human voice (which is rare in contemporary poems), and so we come away from each poem having listened. One of the best first books of poems I've read in quite a while. Highly recommended.