Click to order books
 Latitude, Longitude |  Tide Tables |
 Boiling Hot |  Island Bound Mail |
 Star Map |  Somersault |
Somersault |  Immigrant's Autumn - poems of exile |
 Because There Was No Sea |
Latitude, Longitude
The currents of the sea course throughout the poems of Nancy Anne Miller’s Latitude, Longitude . The work collected here explores the liminal spaces between the surf and shore, the poet and the page, myth and memory, the living and the dead. As the book’s title suggests, the poet wanders with a wondrous awe at the natural world and humanity’s place in it. In these poems Miller helps us locate the many ways we may find beauty, love, and ourselves.
—Richard Georges, Poet, Author of Epiphaneia (Out-Spoken Press 2019) winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 2020
There is a cleanness to Nancy Anne Miller’s poems that reminds me of crystal-clear water; a coolness that feels like a dip into blue seas; a sharpness that hits like the slap of a sudden plunge into deep ocean.
In this collection Miller, Bermuda-born, seeks and finds direction in the latitudinal and longitudinal markings of seascape and shorescape as she explores issues of homesickness, homecoming, ecology, aging, life, death.
Miller’s poems are embedded in the Caribbean Sea, the Atlantic Ocean. Lulled by gentle rhythms, we are surprised by unpredictable currents, unexpected encounters with piercing jagged imagery. Throughout, Miller navigates with deft assurance. As her poems demonstrate, “The island must / always be near.”
—Kim Robinson-Walcott PhD; Editor of Caribbean Quarterly , UWI, Mona, and Jamaican Journal , Institute of Jamaica; and Author of Out of Order! Anthony Winkler and White West Indian Writing (UWI Press 2006)
Tide Tables
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
Boiling Hot
Inspired by her birthplace, Bermuda, Miller successfully blurs the line between exploiting and normalizing the exotic: a seahorse is both the f hole of a cello and a horseshoe pick; the Sand Dollar, an oddity found regularly on the island’s beaches, is compared to an antique star map; a clock in an old supply store is “a porthole with the sea lapping its blue rim”. But if they reference and conjure the exotic, Miller’s poems are grounded by the realities of everyday life and by the sometimes troubled cultural dynamics of both her adopted United States and her island home, where “everything seen tribal” and, in the title poem, where someone “claiming a geography of persons the empire sent across the world” dons white gloves to serve sandwiches to “fair English” church-goers. These are poems that are like “the ocean’s ripples when an anchor strikes deep.”
—Paul Sean Maddern, poet, author of The Beachcomber’s Report
The poems of Nancy Miller are deliciously rich in imagery and metaphor. There is a subtle complexity of meaning embedded in them, enhanced by her intuitive ability to make music with words.
—John Lyons, Painter, poet, author of No Apples in Eden: New and Selected poems
Nancy Anne Miller pushes each poem of her newest collection, Boiling Hot into a performance of music and meaning. Equipped with an anthropologist’s eye and a polymath’s mind, her poems play with ordinary materials, reveal how the “repeated shedding” of a snake’s skin “leaves the tape measure of what it was.” Through Miller’s examination of history and identity, old Empire relics collide with New World knickknacks, poems tackle the thorny legacies of England, Bermuda and New England. In one poem, an antique star map, “round as a crystal ball,” harkens the child’s circle of marbles, where “large planets knock out smaller ones: taws hit pewees.” Typing on her Olivetti in another poem Miller declares: “If I could make [writing] precise…[and] ceremonial I would.” In the deft and dazzling Boiling Hot: she does.
—Julia Shipley, poet, author of The Academy of Hay, Winner of the 2011 Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize
Island Bound Mail
The lines of these poems are sharp and taut and exquisitely crafted. The imagery gorgeous. Nancy Anne Miller’s poems are a riveting revelation.
—Jacqueline Bishop is the author of several books including The Gymnast and Other Positions, which was awarded the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, Non-fiction
At once both lyrical and studied, the poems speak to the slow creep of personal history, a steady yearning for horizons and what lies beyond, and the connections to others that ground us firmly in the place where we find ourselves – by birth, happenstance, or fate.
—Dr. Kim Dismont-Robinson Bermuda Folk Officer
Star Map
Through poems that are full-blown with metaphor and spare in language, we are invited to the contours of Miller’s inner landscape where she bravely faces dislocation and loss. With one foot rooted in her island home, she shows us with keen intelligence and clarity, how the power of nature and the meaning she gives it, can transform the present.
—Wendy Fulton Steginsky, poet and a author of In The Tide Of Bermuda’s Light
Dark imagery and metaphors abound in Miller’s work and as unusual and original as they are we do always know what she means. Her language is sensuous without being precious or sentimental.
—Alan C. Smith, Bermudian artist and performer
Water Logged
Here is a poet whose words evoke the world that is present in her tiny island home … which is all our homes.
—Sharmilla Beezmohun, Deputy Editor Wasafiri—The Magazine of International Contemporary Writing
Miller crafts a catalogue of images and anecdotes so vivid that I imagine them punctuated with splashes of paint.
—Kathi Morrison Taylor, Author of By The Nest
The poems deliver a world familiar and exotic, making us smile at, and ache for, that world which is gone.
— Justen Ahren, Author of A Strange Catechism
Somersault
With dazzlingly unpredictable imagery, Nancy Miller shifts prototypic
narratives and geographies, making the familiar strange and the strange
familiar.
—Kelly Baker Josephs, editor, sx salon: a small axe literary platform
Somersault, is an exquisitely balanced exploration of the power of place to both form and inform us. She writes of Bermuda, its paradisiacal beauty, with rich and original metaphors and striking imagery…
—Edwina Trentham author of Stumbling Into The Light
Nancy Miller’s poetry travels far but homes to landscapes which, seemingly familiar, enchant and surprise.
—Michael Schmidt, poet, editor of PN Review and Carcanet Press
“These poems reek of Bermuda and the sea, all about love and history that dovetail into the present that is both haunting and nostalgic; the poems offer a familiar, yet new perspective, crafted with tender care and an ear for the truth that is indelible.”
—Opal Palmer Adisa, author of 4-headed Woman & Painting Away Regrets
Immigrant’s Autumn Poems of Exile
Nancy Anne Miller’s poems are dazzling, their startling, original images compact almost to bursting. They reveal a visual imagination that clashes, delights, surprises with such impact that we are struck breathless.
—Sondra Zeidenstein, author of Contraries, and founder of Chicory Blue Press
These poems are filled with longing and laughter. Miller’s voice is as delicate as the clink of a Limoge teacup in its saucer and as deep-throated as the sea itself—“alive with addition, subtraction.”
—K.D. Miller, author of All Saints, and founding member of Red Claw Press
As you travel with Nancy Anne Miller along the beaches and reefs of her Bermuda, you see memories of family, friends, and coming of age experiences. Bermuda remains her boat’s compass wherever she reports from.
—John R. Lee, is a St Lucian poet and author of Elemental: New and Selected Poems
Because There Was No Sea
This is a restless, Janus-faced collection, simultaneously looking back on childhood memories of Bermuda (‘alive, fresh as raw meat’) and thirstily drinking in the details of the wider world.”
—Jacob Silkstone, editor of The Missing Slate
Miller approaches the island’s difficult colonial history from a position of exile and with a wondrous ability to find and restore the paradisiacal as she explores the mysteries of one place through the lens of the other.”
—Kim Aubrey, author of What We Hold in Our Hands
Like hand-cut stones strung along a necklace, each of Miller’s poems is its own gem.
—Lisa Howie, Director of Bermuda National Gallery
