Experiences in words

Alice Miller’s tragic view of life makes for some engaging poems.

To say poems are bleak is not to say they are bad. A tragic view of life can make great poetry just as it often makes great drama. Nowhere Nearer, the second collection by New Zealand poet Alice Miller, now resident in Berlin, is certainly grim. But it is also skilful, engaging and sophisticated in its philosophical outlook.

With copious references to European high culture (from Dante in Hell to Chekhov’s three sisters and Joyce’s Buck Mulligan), Miller tells us not only that death is unavoidable, but also that we are inevitably tied to the cultures that formed us and we are likely to find our greatest hopes will be dashed. “Of all the crowds to listen to/it’s the dead who know most”, she tells us in one poem. And in another, “Some of the moments we cling to most/ are the futures we never let happen.”

There are, however, two major compensations for the dire hand that nature has dealt us. They are our awareness of our condition, and our ability to shape our experiences in words. So Nowhere Nearer also tells us about the power of poetry itself, in both the insistent staccato rhythms of My Girl in California and in the complex reflection titled Eva Braun in Linz, in which the daunting power of the past is stressed.

There’s also an oddly optimistic tone to the most New Zealand poem, which is also the book’s most accessible and accomplished. The Sound fuses Polynesian and European mythology to show that culture is not necessarily immutable.

NOWHERE NEARER, by Alice Miller (AUP, $24.99)