The Sea Sleeps: New and Selected Poems (Paraclete Poetry)

Praise for The Sea Sleeps: New and Selected Poems (Paraclete Poetry)

A review of “Sea Sleeps: New and Selected Poems”
By Adie Smith

Greg Miller turns his discerning eye outwards in his newest collections of poems, The Sea Sleeps, translating experience into finely wrought verse. A scholar of the Welsh metaphysical poet and Anglican priest, George Herbert, Miller draws from Herbert’s use of form to contain expansive ideas.
Selected from several previous published collections, as well as large selections of new poems, The Sea Sleeps reveals Miller’s range over nearly a decade of published work. Undeterred by experimentation, Miller’s poems are of a refreshed formalism. “Forgiveness” sprawls across the page in shattered lines, while other poems fall into a regimental meter.
To Miller, poetics is a system of calculating and finding value, of showing the relationships between things, both internal in the poem itself, but also in the external world. Where structure is stable, the subject matter is fluid.
The strength of Miller’s work is in the humanness of the narrator. Like the Psalmist, he struggles with his faith, with the brokenness of the world. Throughout the collection, the speaker movers from a France steeped in its past, to war-torn South Sudan, to his window overlooking “one tree in white bloom.” No matter the locale, Miller’s careful selection of detail is transporting.
Greg Miller’s cultural contributions extend beyond his poetry. The Janice B. Trimble Professor of English at Millsaps College, he was featured in a 2011 article in Oxford American, highlighting his work with Sudanese refuges. Poems addressing Miller’s work with these refugees are included are several translations.
Miller makes the familiar unfamiliar. In “Capital Towers,” he turns his attention to Jackson:
the Governor’s mansion, Statehouse, the decaying grand King Edward, and the Electric Building— the last gutted like a fish, its art deco scales intact and buffed lustrous against brown marble. My eye, intent ever on artifice, wanders. I am a crow with an eye for shiny things
“The Sea Sleeps” is a wonderful poetic garb bag, showcasing the breadth of Miler’s experience and insight. 


Greg Miller’s The Sea Sleeps: New & Selected Poems is an extraordinary collection of poems that celebrate and confirm the joy to be found in a life dedicated to the service of humanity. Miller, who is an authority on the poetry of British poet George Herbert, displays the same grandeur of spirit as his British predecessor in poems that are suffused with humility, respect, and love for a suffering humanity. He writes with equal ease of God, his family, the natural world, his travels, and his own work with both Sudanese refugees and the victims of Hurricane Katrina.  He embodies this dazzling array of subject matter by using both traditional narrative structure and formal verse. Many of his poems are conventional sonnets with a modern twist. The book also includes his translations of Guillaume Apollinaire’s French and George Herbert’s Latin.

As a whole, Greg Miller’s The Sea Sleeps: New & Selected Poems is a luminous and sometimes startling examination of what it means to be a person of faith in the modern world. These poems trace Miller’s often turbulent, at times resigned, devotion to God and humanity.

Miller as humanitarian is fearless as he espouses an ethic of care and love as the basis of our shared existence. This is a book about the transformative power of love.
—Sonja James, author of Baiting the Hook (the Bunny & the Crocodile Press, 1999), Children of the Moon (Argonne House Press, 2004), and Calling Old Ghosts to Supper (Finishing Line Press, 2013)


Greg Miller’s The Sea Sleeps takes its title from a George Herbert poem, an epigram addressing divine control: “As you sleep, the sea rises: as O, Christ, you rise again, / the sea sleeps: how well the reins you hold!” Miller is one of the foremost Herbert scholars and translators, maneuvering Herbert’s astonishing verse from its original Latin into an English that sings, and the seventeenth-century poet’s influence is palpable in The Sea Sleeps, which collects a handful of Miller’s brave new poems along with selected poems from his previous books of poetry and translation. In their lyric complexity as well as their devotional and sometimes formal qualities, these poems have much in common with Herbert. But there is much more that is uniquely Miller’s in this book, including the range of contemporary locations and themes explored, from the lives of Sudanese refugees in his hometown to the chapels and gallery walls of France. In the new poems, Miller’s ambitious verse wrestles with faith in God’s presence in a world marked by urban decay, war, global hunger, and the local cruelties of poverty, domestic abuse, and ordinary grief. Reading the translations alongside his original work dealing with these more modern concerns, the reader is struck by Herbert’s continued relevance. A compelling aesthetic and a line of inquiry emerge through the backward chronological arrangement of these poems, and it’s instructive to follow Miller’s artistic investigations over time, particularly for readers interested in devotional and formalist poetry—though by no means does Miller work strictly in traditional forms. The standard position is that these classic approaches have no place in the landscape of contemporary verse, and Miller’s work is a powerful counterpoint.


For Greg Miller, religion and poetry both seem to function primarily as soothing agents, softening the rough contours of the world, asserting harmony and design where at first one sees only pain or ugliness. In The Sea Sleeps; New and Selected Poems, Miller writes with a measured, thoughtful tone about what he’s visited, artworks he’s seen, and subjects he’s read about, and a quiet spirituality is everywhere apparent. It seems to be inherent in his mildness of manner.
There is devotion to the clear-eyed, undeceived, yet still optimistic witness Miller pays to everything around him—and in the refusal to indulge in hysterics. Even during Hurricane Katrina (“Wake”), his lines retain their stately pace and well-balance clarity:
                In the wake of the eye, our oak cracks
                   one thick
                limb on a pivot, then lifts, about to split.
                From the dark we watch the neighbor’s
                   pear splay,
                wind fling green pecans, wires block the driveway,
                one low black wire (alive?) swinging in
                   the road.
Miller’s poems of faith may be a means to access something he’s not—something more serene and thoughtful and decent than anyone really could be. Raising his songs of “shaped praise,” he finds ways to make from an unruly, often unbearable world something beautiful and whole, pouring balm on the ugliness he sees with the measured cadences of poetry. —David Danoff, Tikkun, Fall 2015