The Comma After Love

by Miller, Raeburn; Mackin, Cooper R.; Olson, Richard D.; Justice, Donald Rodney

• ISBN13: 9781884836046
• ISBN10: 1884836046
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-10-01
• Publisher: Univ of Akron Pr

Summary

From more than nine hundred poems left behind at the poet's death, Donald Justice has chosen the seventy-four representative works that comprise The Comma After Love: Selected Poems of Raeburn Miller: By turns rueful and amused, intimate and restrained, these poems speak movingly about the difficulties of love and faith, the pleasures of friendship and poetry, the lonliness and disappointments of the solitary life. In his introduction to this volume, Donald Justice calls Raeburn Miller ""a natural poet who found writing a thing he did simply as a part, an important part, of staying alive,"" and discovers in these poems an ""expansive and unshakably romantic spirit that drives the work and in the end proves exhilarating.""

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Introduction	xi
Donald Justice
A Translation from Memory (Baudelaire)	1	(1)
Heat	2	(1)
Midas	3	(3)
Medusa	6	(2)
Two Poems for Megan	8	(4)
Assignation	12	(1)
Luxe, Calme	13	(1)
The Summing Up	14	(1)
from In Memory of an Actor (I)	15	(1)
Tamed with Regret	16	(1)
Ash Wednesday	17	(1)
Portal	18	(1)
Names and Habitations	19	(2)
Journal Entry	21	(2)
Paranoia	23	(1)
The Lantern	24	(1)
Lines from a Postcard	25	(4)
Clouds and Syllables	29	(1)
1/1/---	30	(2)
Poem Instead of a Letter	32	(2)
The Right Choice	34	(2)
Storm	36	(2)
Two Fragments toward a Suicide Note	38	(4)
Final Poem for a Sequence	42	(2)
Mnemonics for a Late Spring	44	(1)
Planning Ahead	45	(1)
Ahasuerus	46	(1)
Poets and Their Bibliographies	47	(1)
To---(after Li Shang-yin)	48	(1)
Conundrum	49	(1)
The Sake of Argument	50	(1)
Advice to the Players	51	(2)
A Red Red Rose	53	(2)
To Starve a Fever	55	(3)
Love Poem	58	(1)
On the Success of Former Students	59	(1)
After Wang Wei	60	(1)
Thus Let Thy Power	61	(1)
Decor	62	(1)
Rationale of Dissipation	63	(1)
Letter Found in a Refrigerator	64	(1)
Epistemological Epigram	65	(1)
Prose Poems	66	(3)
Convertible Invocations	69	(1)
On Millay's Translation of Baudelaire	70	(2)
Scraps	72	(1)
The Caged Cobra (after Rilke)	73	(1)
Regimen	74	(1)
Revisions	75	(1)
For a Saint	76	(1)
Dispositions	77	(1)
For Donald Justice (after Li Po)	78	(1)
A Curse from Propertius	79	(1)
Pensees	80	(1)
Gulf Breeze (after Mallarme)	81	(1)
Peptides	82	(1)
Q.E.D.	83	(1)
Triptych	84	(1)
Epitaph (after the Greek)	85	(1)
A Soliloquy for Seraphia	86	(1)
Song	87	(1)
Depression	88	(1)
Expectancy	89	(1)
Philistia	90	(2)
As You Say	92	(1)
An Eventual Elegy	93	(1)
Recalling Cottonwoods	94	(1)
High Five	95	(1)
News Photo	96	(1)
Rewriting Another's Draft	97	(1)
The Nudist in Drag	98	(1)
On Teaching Another's Keats Assignment	99	(1)
The Shape of Things	100	(2)
Vitals	102	(1)
Some Sums	103	(6)
Index of Titles and First Lines	109