Nancy Anne Miller

Andre Bagoo, who is the editor of Moko Magazine asked me to submit a critique of a favourite poem. I selected Craig Raine’s “How Snow Falls” as he is one of the original Martian Poets whose writing looks at and reinvents the world through lively metaphorical imagery. His  collection “A Martian Sends A Postcard Home”  introduces and uses language that a Martian might use to describe what he encounters on the earth to his fellow Martians back home. The language is one of seeing  the world through a context outside of the familiar comparisons. I found a connection to and encouragement from the work of the Martian Poets as I began to explore my use of image metaphor in poems.

Nancy Anne Miller on “How Snow Falls” by Craig Raine – Moko (mokomagazine.org)

SurvVision is an international journal for Surrealist Poetry. Befittingly, the editor was born in Russia, was blacklisted by the Communist party, and now lives in Ireland.

SurVision published Leonora’s Landscape about the Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, and The Poem is Here, which is from a series, likewise titled, where I disregard a narrative context for image metaphors, instead allow them to interact, inform each other. Fun! N.

My poem “Sun Spots” has been published in the recent edition of MOKO which is a literary journal  based in the British Virgin Isles.

Nancy

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Nancy Anne Miller’s short-stanza free verse is distinguished by her imagery. Before devoting herself to poetry, Miller was a photographer and a painter. One finds both these visual orientations in her poetry. As a photographer, she takes snapshots of objects and captures them in their instantaneity; she feels through images, as in her evocation of climbing a spiral staircase in To Keep the Light where: The spinning steps up, causes a dervish trance, the ecstasy of circling. As a painter, she achieves a poetic equivalent to spatial perspective through her often startling metaphors and similes. Miller’s poems brim and burst with images: an object evokes another object evokes another object. In this way, she gives her poems weight and three-dimensionality. In Mosquito Net at Elma Napier’s Estate: The muslin ties at the bottom, like a mango heavy in a string market bag she bought in Baptiste. Hangs like an exclamation mark for the filmy subconscious.

At times, as with Relief and Postal, Miller develops a single metaphor, mixing keen observation with humour; more frequently, the images succeed each other in a manner echoing a stream of consciousness narrative, as in Every Civilization where in describing a tea urn: Liquid the colour of elastic downpours into an elephant’s trunk in an empire where all human memory was stretched.

It is by such imaginative means that she pursues her impassioned quest to express her several cultural allegiances, to Bermuda, England, and America, as in Every Civilization, England Taught Me, and Postal. Through her imagery, she manages, often wryly, sometimes tenderly, always playfully, to point up striking contrasts between these three Anglophone worlds. Her Bermudian roots hold her firmly and give to all her poems a textural vivacity and a sensuous liveliness; one comes away from her poetry refreshed as if one had gulped cold water in a dry land.

—George Hobson, poet, author of Faces of Memory, a former Anglican priest for The American Cathedral in Paris

My eighth book Tide Tables will be released shortly. Here is a poem from it. Every Civilization was also recently published in The Caribbean Writer. The photo was taken at Coral Beach Club by a Kodak Instamatic camera. I always shoot a roll of images with one when I go to Bermuda. The prints are less sharp, have a filmy texture, and I have to wait a few weeks to see what I actually shot. 

nnnnnnnEvery Civilization

nnnnnnnNeeds its pillars,
nnnnnnnnthe rubber tree
is such in Coral Beach Club’s domain.

nnnBelow, the roots pile like
dead bones from an excavation,
nnbrown leaves archival paper

nnnto pick up artifacts. I was
nncivilized here. The silver urn
nfor tea placed ritualistically on

nnnthe linen tablecloth as if
nnan altar. Liquid the colour
nnof elastic downpours into

nnnnan elephant’s trunk in
nnnnnan empire where all
nhuman memory was stretched.

I am pleased to annouce two of my poems, “Straw” and “Secret Society” were published in PREE, a cutting edge Caribbean literary magazine.

PREE is a unique online magazine for new contemporary writing from and about the Caribbean. They publish original works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays, interviews and experimental writing, giving authors international visibility far beyond the islands.

For its third issue PREE invited submissions that would tell stories about how we live in the surreal/unreal/hyper-real home we call the Caribbean. Check out PREE over the coming weeks to see how authors engaged with the theme TheCaribbeanIsNotaRealPlace.

Bermudian poet Nancy Anne Miller recently read her poem Pearl from her chapbook Conch, which the Bermuda Arts Council funded in 2002; this is her second reading as part of Angles of Light: Readings of Caribbean Poetry.

Ms. Miller said, “I read my poem Pearl from my chapbook Conch which the Bermuda Arts Council funded in 2002. The poem is named after the family ship “Pearl” which sank during the mid nineteenth century. I use this incident from Bermuda’s maritime history to metaphorically write about owning my own poetic voice, and ultimately for discovering and claiming Bermuda as my main subject matter.

Full text of the article here and listen to an audio recording of the reading Angles of Light: Readings of Caribbean Poetry.

Ayanna Witter Johnson is an African British musician of Jamaican heritage. She sings, plays the cello and composes. Here she performs Anchor with the London Symphony Orchestra from her Black Panther CD.

Six poems about Bermudian colonial life published by University of Miami Libraries’ Anthurium on February 12, 2019

and…

Five more published on March 1, 2019 in Dodging The Rain, an art and literary journal founded and edited by graduates of NUI Galway’s MA in Writing and Literature and Publishing programmes. Dodging The Rain provides an internet platform that showcases writers and artists worldwide. Galway, Ireland is its spiritual home.