Poet Linda Sonia Miller & brieflybriefly

Linda Sonia Miller has been a poet and teacher of literature and creative writing for almost thirty years. She has also studied Henry David Thoreau on the shores of Walden Pond, lived and taught for a formative five years in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, and for a year among the Winnebago people in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. She has published short essays in The New York Times, poems in a variety of journals, and her first chapbook Something Worth Diving For (Finishing Line Press) in 2012. Linda has also been a Connecticut Writing Project Fellow and Institute Director, as well as the recipient of three National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships.

In brieflybriefly, her new full-length book of poetry, poet Linda Sonia Miller brings together works written over the past decade. She writes in precise, musical and accessible language, as she also plays with form – from inventive free verse to the more constrained sestina and sonnet, never losing sight of the relationship between form and meaning. These poems focus on the development of the self, the passage of time, the political world and its effects on the personal, the intimate world of relationships, as well as insights into childhood, and her appreciation of the natural world and its correspondence to the human soul. Ms. Miller is generous in revealing the mind of an introspective individual whose experiences span decades. She is a poet with a sense of humor, yet one who always takes the act of living seriously.

Selections from Something Worth Diving For

Bougainvillea

I learned nothing of flowers in the city blocks
where I spent hours growing, but read
of heather sweeping the moors and tulips
lining Amsterdam’s streets, and edelweiss
painting the Alpine slopes with color,
but I loved most the idea of bougainvillea—
its vowel-rich, Creole-sounding name, drawling,
lazy like southern nights in Civil War romances.
I saw in bougainvillea smooth lavenders
and pinks, hot reds and satin-sheet whites,
smelled a heavy sweetness, sultry and moist,
dreamt tropical nights, palm-sheltered islands
and Gauguin watching his women wrapped
in Tahitian cloth, whispering together
on the mission porch, weaving tight braids
into long black hair, tucking bougainvillea
behind their ears.
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Poetry

In my first remembered home, books spilled
from bookcases, and you read aloud to us

And the highwayman came riding, riding
up to the old inn door.

Windows opened without screens onto city streets
and Louie-the-Cat leaped from sill to sill

two stories high, above the concrete alley
where the super’s daughter sat, sun-drying her hair

Bess, the landlord’s daughter, the landlord’s
black-eyed daughter.

There was Casey too, last man at bat,
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and King Lear’s

wails of betrayal, your eyes glistening
with his pain, your stormy self lost in poetry.

In five plain rooms with old tweed chairs
on hot city summer days

my sister and I would hang like damp clothes
from sofa-arms, our brothers limp on the floor

and listen to your booming voice,
the cadence of verses, syllables crashing

like waves on the shore
of our small parched planet.

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Spring Cleaning: Northeast Kingdom, Vt. 1978

When the season’s final hours tease us into spring
and temperatures rise melting blackened stacks of snow,
warming us as if winter were but a dream –

when loggers’ wives emerge from tar-shingled homes
with armloads of dishes, pots and clothes, sofas, tables, toys,
like offerings to appease the north-wind gods, and place them

upon shrines of rugs atop white-green lawns, then return
to emptied homes, wash walls and floors with suds-swollen ferocity.
When that reprieve arrives with sun-streaked days, I listen

from my glassed in porch to my neighbors’ Quebecois chatter,
mysterious to me, newcomer, new mother, watching
this sudden bustle and commotion, the once barren slope now

a collage of color, sunlight leaping from pans to polished tabletops,
and forget my world of books and toddlers, hours of isolation,
months of dark and shortened days.

I emerge, jealous of such joyful purpose, inhale the soapy,
sun-warmed air, feel the sodden ground beneath my feet,
something inside me cleansed.

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Read Selections from brieflybriefly

Poet Linda Sonia Miller & brieflybriefly

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