(CLOSE)

<p class=ql-align-justify>There is a haunting scent of loss in these poems that prompts me to recall what Miller wrote in 1976 about Jack Spicer's friend Robin Blaser:</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>Blaser's language is a dense language folded in upon itself and continually alive with interruptions ...</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>The language of <em>CLOSE</em> is a Beckettian hellish half-light in which the near and the untouchable seem both tangible and yet 'pared down'. However it possesses what all important reflections upon loss reveal:</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>Unknowing: an engagement with the unknown.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>This deeply moving sequence of poetry and prose taps upon the reader's door: enter.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>- Ian Brinton</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>David Miller examines words and phrases as if they are displayed on a rotating stand enabling us to view them from a myriad of different perspectives. In his poetry prose and prose poems things are never simply what they seem; there is always something more something deeper something beyond. Whether creating expansive word collages or paring poems down to their constituent parts he is a skilled craftsperson utilising concision elision contrast and paradox to open up meanings as one opens up Matryoshka Dolls. At the heart of his vision are pathways leading us to the experience of expanse. </p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>- Revd Jonathan Evens</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>David Miller here writes poems about death about a death where grief love and sentiment are shorn of sentimentality and the 'show' of grief. He does this with a balance of minimalism repetition and the abstract words isolated and ringing. There is a poem here in memory of Robert Lax a poet Miller admires immensely and few have pitched words in space found the pitch of words like Miller and Lax.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>- Keith Jebb</p><p><br></p><p><br></p>