Ecstasy -- The Tree Entire -- Nature -- Wishing Well -- Accident -- & Darkness Moves In -- Stranger -- Empire -- Feeling -- Loaded for Bear -- My Sad Pony -- Without Thinking -- Acquisition -- Loyalty -- Dominion -- Cameo -- Lead us to Wonder -- Bloody Hounds -- Belling the Leader of a Flock of Sheep -- Metaphor -- Together -- So-And-So -- Star -- Freaks -- Resemblance -- Future -- Verboten -- Far Cities -- Forgiveness Granted -- Evergreen -- Time -- Snow -- Now -- Leading Men -- Physicality -- Exquisite -- Dead -- Lights -- Again -- Our Love -- The Invitation -- Moonset -- Begging -- Tomorrow -- That I -- Gone -- Creation -- Boundaries -- Saving me the Trouble & the Time -- My Humanity -- Frightening Moonlessness -- An Optimist & A Fantasist -- Memory -- Reputation -- Wrought Iron -- Comes from the Server the Same Banished Wines -- No One Is Home Where I Once Lived -- Happy Birthday -- My Severed Head -- Death's Yellow Hospital Drip -- Demystifying Jane -- Feeding the quivering nighthawk -- Surrender -- Marriage -- Like A Locket -- A Little Myth -- My Pastoral -- Blue Field -- Yellow Field -- Purple Field -- Consciousness -- Statues of Moss -- Sticks of Flesh in Transit -- Rain Lilies are Gypsies Too -- Purple Thistle -- Written On Water -- Romantic Figures -- Quivering Glass -- Wild Figs -- Street of Dreams -- Let's Take Home One Rock -- Knowledge -- Leafless -- Sheep -- Granite -- In A Tree -- The Reader -- The Reincarnated -- A Rose Petal -- A Young Poet -- About the Author.
Summary:
Written as an elegy for her parents, Jane Miller's Thunderbird investigates cultural memory while invoking ancient and the ultramodern. This book-length sequence of short poems scrolls without interruption, exposing death's facility in transforming family and home. On a larger scale, the poems explore how the body and mind can redeem loss, even when challenged by the terrors of the Holocaust and modern militarism. Moving variously through such places as an emergency room, and ancient olive grove, the streets of Berlin, a movie set, the "night-petaled black heaven," and thus ultimately the world of spirit, Miller plies the many incarnations of the thunderbird to examine mortality, madness, and love. As my patient's pupils whiten, they are like comets stopped by a severe stare, it is like feeling the jet to death the empty billeted corridor, it is like looking at a comet and seeing the moving stairs to it, as welcoming and bombed.
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