Richard Miles
Poet
Selected Poetry
Current Publication
Boat of Two Shores
poems
Richard Miles
2007, paperback
Order through ummpress
A letterpress edition is available from
The Stone Island Press.
To order, contact Bernie Vinzani
Machado knew that what the poet is looking for "is not the fundamental I but
the deep you." With what I can only describe as a holy man's capacity for
quiet, fierce compassion, Dick Miles goes looking for the junctures-seams and
transports-that mysteriously unbound the I: half awake I swim out / to cut
your mooring your moorings of air / and let you course through me. In Boat of
Two Shores, a reader joins the poet in "fending off personhood," reviving
"self" to deeper, richer manifolds of time and feeling. Rocking between
shores, yes, but also between walls, species, geologies, histories,
wishes-here is a listening, feeling maker, wise in all the wind's directions.
From cove, cave, room, river, cabin, grave-here is a poet seeing, singing past
the limits, armed with a stonemason's knowledge of where the limits are, and
where they need not be. Here is uncommonly felt knowledge. In these poems the
weight and loft of words-the strange fits of syntax-come together in uncanny
patterns of intuition, solace, and spare elegance-in blossoming force. So the
first meeting is reunion, writes Miles. Yes. And gracias.
SARAH GRIDLEY
The poetry of Richard Miles is musical in the root sense of the word: it honors the harmony of the muse, the soul-giving and soul-rending anima that haunts our fragile lives. As it gives voice to the intense permeability of our feelings and the natural world that occasions those feelings, it is metaphysical. Miles' quest is to somehow limn the beauty of what is glimpsed and adored and never understood. A poetry of essences and emanations, it is full of quiet, spellbinding rapture.
BARON WORMSER
There is an urgency of regret and pitch--with elation breaking through-that comes to inhabit the places of Richard Miles' poems. They often arrive in the other-wordly embrace of John Clare, yet seize the steady summons of Rilke's proposition that naming the unnamed is the poet's calling. You will be entered and changed by reading this quietly extraordinary book.
KATHLEEN FRASER
In the indeterminate realm between worlds: that is where the mystery lies. And that is the place this poet inhabits, from whence he bears his gorgeous and unsettling news.
KURT BROWN
When the shores are us, and the distance is understood to be the separateness of our own beings, some kind of other language is needed. That is what this book offers.
ROGER CONOVER
SARAH GRIDLEY
The poetry of Richard Miles is musical in the root sense of the word: it honors the harmony of the muse, the soul-giving and soul-rending anima that haunts our fragile lives. As it gives voice to the intense permeability of our feelings and the natural world that occasions those feelings, it is metaphysical. Miles' quest is to somehow limn the beauty of what is glimpsed and adored and never understood. A poetry of essences and emanations, it is full of quiet, spellbinding rapture.
BARON WORMSER
There is an urgency of regret and pitch--with elation breaking through-that comes to inhabit the places of Richard Miles' poems. They often arrive in the other-wordly embrace of John Clare, yet seize the steady summons of Rilke's proposition that naming the unnamed is the poet's calling. You will be entered and changed by reading this quietly extraordinary book.
KATHLEEN FRASER
In the indeterminate realm between worlds: that is where the mystery lies. And that is the place this poet inhabits, from whence he bears his gorgeous and unsettling news.
KURT BROWN
When the shores are us, and the distance is understood to be the separateness of our own beings, some kind of other language is needed. That is what this book offers.
ROGER CONOVER
We were walking
in the mountains lost
climbed a granite dome
and there was the water
a cove with a boat painted salmon
it did not matter if it grew dark
the flames within brightened
by the beams without
we sat ate nuts drank lemonade
lay down stretched rolled about
we saw a boat
we saw the sun
walking away on stepping stones
spaced more widely the farther he went
until he flung his cape
the boat's color
on the peak opposite
balancing the world
a barefoot moon
the lid was closing
our laughter
united in wind and darkness
paths with harness bells
came to us eagerly
a path that vanished
in the moss like a snake
one like the aisle of a brass wedding
a path streaming upward like fireworks
we stopped we went on
into the deep river
for Kathryn & Gray
I am digging a grave
for a wren who flew darting
like a young setter devouring scent
into our glass slider my trowel dings two
clear brown stones gazing up at me waiting
as if they knew this meeting must come one day
they are my mother's eyes and know me
in that backward and forward gaze of a mother
dead now fifty-five years I cannot touch them
they know me so well nor can I place the wren
on top of them so I put my face in the hole
blinding us both smell the wet adolescent earth
as it dampens my shirt mapping
like an island taking shape
head in the ground I see myself issuing
from her eyes and their send-off
her glance covering me like a torn net
The stone
and through the stone passed summer
winter in wind
like a chattering of souls in the last car of a train
and the oblique sun
inspires ravens
and the quiver for the words for things
hanging at the top of a feathered spruce
blows over vacant
as the scarf of wind
whatever holds us in its hand
set us prophetically on a large stone
in a ravine
our thoughts a dome
scratched by raven calls
Orion
there he is still
but sliding south
stalking while drifting
shoulders aslant
tight belt
swollen toe
huge and transparent
my ghost with bones
Water on the bay
like certain summer days
carries a dark core
unreleased until moonrise
moves like sand in tideglass
plaiting
its arrival stippled
its shadow inside