In Passing

John N. Miller's meditations on family, childhood love, grief, mortality, history, and place take us deep into the heart of lives acutely observed. Whether he's writing about war veterans coming home, fishing with his father, or old friends passed on, his voice is calm and clear, with hope and acknowledgment of what it means to be a thoughtful human being. In "Intervals," he's philosophical: "... 'The farther out we look / the farther back in time we see the stars- / and if, like God, we could look far enough / we'd see the space-born, nebulous / beginnings of creation.'" In the title poem, "In Passing," he realizes, recovers, and accepts history: "A sandstone bluff above a waterhole / made El Morro National Monument / a well-marked campsite. / Here / 'Ancestral Puebloans, Spanish and American / travelers carved over 2,000 signatures, / dates, messages, and petroglyphs' / before they passed into obscurity. / Daylight deepened their inscriptions." In "Emily Dickinson," he captures that great poet lovingly in her Amherst garden: "The garden waited. Birds held magic speech / against the haze of still trees, as the throb / of insects dropped into the sanguine reaches / of her heart." In a poem about his childhood, "In Honolulu, 1947," war becomes the hopefulness of young love, carefully plotted: "You stood shy / and silent also in that half-moon night / outside our eighth-grade canteen and its music, / lured by a speech I'd carefully prepared / and passed on through a friend." These are fine, poignant poems easy to read quickly but with the depth to encourage our return time and time again.