Edgewise

In the poem "Edgewise," a rooftop encounter with a determined weed leads to a momentary vision of wilderness encroaching on domesticity. The struggle to make and hold a place for oneself amid the world s claims and counterclaims, to navigate among moving objects and not be displaced, is at the heart of many of the sixty-five poems in Stuart Miller s first collection. The vantage points are many. In "Home," a child hears the buried disjunction of his parents lives in his mother s curse and his father s idle whistling. In "Madeleine," a new arrival from Cuba enters the classroom like a guided missile, blowing up the numbing routines of her fellow students. "Shadowline" summons the memory of a dark, quiet neighborhood now hot real estate whose "lone police car / checking a break-in. Its hoodlight / strobing dead space" has given way to "flashlit faces, / crowding past orange squares / of neon and nylon." In "Port of Entry," an expectant immigrant to America, boiling his egg, is cautioned that he s headed for a world "of noise and names, / changed and familiar. / Your open door. Your prison." In the end, however, these poems are not weighted toward contingency and flux. They are pitched on relatedness, connection. They are themselves locations, lineaments of firm ground. What alternative world could we inhabit, after all? As the subway rider in another poem recognizes: "If you see through everything, / you ll see nothing but ghosts."