E. Ethelbert Miller. How We Sleep on The Nights We Don't Make Love.

E. Ethelbert Miller. How We Sleep on The Nights We Don't Make Love. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone P, 2004. 74 pp. $12.95.

E. Ethelbert Miller's 2004 poetry collection leaves readers with a glimpse into the mind of a sensitive observer of human experience. Unlike his previous works, this one is not exclusively political and spiritual, but the themes and insights in these poems bespeak concerns from the familial to the famous. His poems terse yet pungent, Miller changes thematic directions. Moreover, this new collection marks a full departure in theme and in technique from some of his selected earlier work as indicated in his much more politically involved First Light: New and Selected Poems (1994) and his Where Are The Love Poems for Dictators? (1986), as well as his Season of Hunger/Cry of Rain: Poems 1975-1980.

However, when one looks at the body of work that Miller has produced since he began publishing poems in 1974 when he began his career as Director of the Afro American Studies Department's Resource Center at Howard University, it is hard to generalize about any of it. However, while his work ranges across diverse styles, themes, and ideas, beneath it all, one hears the humanist voice of this poet, essayist, anthologist, editor, political activist, television host, and radio talk personality who helped found the Humanities Council in Washington, DC.

Although political subjects do not dominate these poems, the political is not completely absent. If by political, we understand the contingencies of power and its use or abuse, then power emerges in his handling of such subjects as Palestinians, Liberians, Algerians, and Omar, Miller's recurring Muslim child persona who represents many levels of the political, the religious, and the ethnic in the realms of Miller's imagination. Here in this new collection, issues of family life and fathering, in particular, ring poignantly as human subjects dominating the political in such poems as "My House," "In Shadows There Are Men," and "All that could go wrong." Additionally, Miller's persona adopts a middle-aged voice, a voice looking to the past for the lingering remnants of love unfulfilled, to youth recalled in the sound of old, long-ago popular tunes as in "La, La, La," and an adolescent, self-conscious awkwardness as in "It Must be Lester Young."

Form merges with content as Miller conjures the many scenes of fatherhood in "My House." Within the short page-long space of this poem, Miller spans two whole generations: father and son, son then father. A narrative fluidity between generations is reflected in the shape and outlines of the poem as well as its content. His persona records the softly ironic reaction of a father toward his son's trying on the father's shirt. The little boy all but "swims" within the excess cloth, but the child's experience reminds the father of how he once "floated" around in his own father's oversized shoes. Both son and father were testing the feel of adult male power--power highly over-rated and all too quickly diminished. Symbolically announcing their unearned demand for respect and power, the tone of the poem is jocular as the father meditates on this act of imitating from the child who wants all too quickly to be "grown."

Innocence disappears in "Midnight Caller," in which a son's involvement in urban violence alarms his father. "My House," with its portrayal of how the mantle of maturity passes orderly from the old to the young, gives way to the harrowing chaos of urban violence in "Midnight Caller." Violence short circuits all logical patterns, the neat diachronicity of logical generational movement shatters in a postmodern synchronicity, the vertical takes over because violence dominates the generational accession when teenagers own guns and their elders do not.

In Miller's poems of domesticity, then, all is not quiet on the domestic front. Perhaps, one should say, "beneath" the domestic front. Miller uses an ironic voice with subtle, oppositional sentiments to reproach self-sacrificing fatherhood. His elliptical strategy embodied in the emotional undertow of the objective correlative grasps this whole body of subtlety, objection, the toll that fathering takes.

Sustaining a tone somewhere between father love's poignancy and sorrow's regret, his poetry's imagery quietly mourns the inevitable loss of boyhood's dreams and self-indulgent pleasures that can no longer occupy space in his life. Everything for the children first and foremost. Some of his poems celebrate the daily, the mundane in marriage and family life, even the failure of one's dreams.

The conflict between maturity and whimsy emerges best in "All that could go wrong" (64). Miller's persona recalls his own father's resigned, almost catatonic place at the dinner table during Miller's childhood. Echoing Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays," the poet registers how his sensitivities awaken to the sacrifices that his own father made as well as to the meaning of his catatonia. What seemed in boyhood an emotionally unavailable father now, in adulthood, seems a perfectly rational way of facing the world. Three vociferous children packed into a small New York apartment with a talkative wife surrounding a quiet, retiring father could (now, in retrospect) easily have yielded an aloof father:

   A man in my own house with my wife's back to me.
   In bed where I might have
   slept alone if it was not for some sense of duty
   to death or marriage or whatever comes next in this
   life which kills so slowly
   and every breath is his breath (11. 16-24).

In paternity's always recurring, diachronic fashion, his father's straight jacketed motionlessness threatens to become his own.

"New York: St. Vincent's Hospital" deftly penetrates the meaning of the loss of a patriarch: "The quietness of death is a predictable conversation" (1.13). Predictable? The conversation is not for those left behind to guess, second guess, every contact with the now dead: "What words could open your eyes?" (18).

Miller's Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer (2000) provides an intellectual resonance with the poetry in this collection: many of these poems might well have been written concurrently with the memoirs. That is, the issues of both books run parallel, each sparking the other.

Miller's poems are often marked by a simplicity of structure--one that belies a complex of feelings. "All that could go wrong" seems simple, straightforward. But the poet assumes a trickster's voice he often employs, and his sly, subtle humor hides a Bakhtinian carnival of pleasure, of laughter, of comedic union. As he writes in "May 26, 2002":

   I miss you.
   I'm always touching your rim
   and slipping out.... (ll. 3-5)
   Sometimes/the music bounces like a ball and
   love is something you can't catch
   and so you keep shooting (ll.8-10).

Humorous and ironic, the poem's main metaphor is the basketball court, but sex enters with unpredictability. Whether basketball or love, both "games" are always, in the final analysis, up to chance, luck. Even finely honed skills cannot guarantee certain victory. Control leads only to disaster in both "games." The speaker asserts his hard won right to comment on fragility, exposure, and pain.

Famous men--Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass, and Richard Wright, among others--appear in these poems. They are countenanced by movements: J. Edgar Hoover's Cointelpro, the 1960's Civil Rights Movements, sways and trends throughout the 60s. A poem about Frederick Douglass turns on Mrs. Douglass's musings on her oncoming death, on Douglass's next wife--white and already selected. Lester Young reflects Miller's own awkward adolescence. Finally, "A Poem for Richard" hauntingly recapitulates Richard Wright's visit from Langston Hughes before Wright's death in Paris. These poems are quick, short, direct, ideological yet inchoate in their intellectual energies.

Miller's poems speak more to our own eccentricities than his. They speak more to our fears than to his. Miller sprinkles the balm of his language throughout these poems, Buddha-like, dispensing forgiveness at every poetic turn and rhetorical twist in an unexpected next line.

Reviewed by

Priscilla R. Ramsey Howard University

African American Review, Volume 40, Number 2 [c] 2006 Priscilla R. Ramsey