In the Temple of Mehyt

by Danielle S LeBlanc

Overview

Through recurring dreams of grandeur, self-sabotage, and defeat, Benjamin Miller’s collection Without Compass explores the desert margins between faith and emptiness, between “desire and its counterfeits.” Carved down, elliptical, the poems seek “the perfect flaw” with which to “cruel you to thought.” From behind the “veil and doubt” of the lyric voice, they lead us in pursuit of the possibility of belief.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780994975102
Publisher:	La Venta West
Publication date:	12/06/2015
Series:	Ancient Egyptian Romances , #2
Pages:	340
Sales rank:	141,964
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.99(h) x 0.76(d)

About the Author

BENJAMIN MILLER has degrees from Harvard and Columbia, and studies Composition and Rhetoric at the CUNY Graduate Center.

What People are Saying About This

Kevin Prufer

“Nuanced, discomforting, and filled with a fascinating spiritual awe.”

Tom Healy

“These gorgeous, painful poems map the unpredictable weather of the psyche: torrential, scorching, cold or calm. We would be lost without them.”

Lytton Smith

“Ben Miller’s precise debut is a work of forceful imagination and elegant verve – a masterstroke of approach and echolocation.”

Editorial Reviews

07/21/2014
Through delicately woven motifs, the poems in Miller's debut collection echo and build off one another cohering in central themes of navigation and orientation (and its inverse, disorientation). Despite being mostly non-sequential, Miller's seven "Desert" poems each close with the line that opens the next poem in the series, a circling that builds a loose narrative momentum between the poems. Similarly, images layer in complexity and dynamic potential; wings, instruments of movement, recur in different contexts: "Like falling kites, the night came in a rush/ To settle just outside the window, garnet eyes/ Outlined by swaying trees. Pewter-slow,/ My throat contracted. Hidden wings unfurled." Later, Miller writes, "Again the sudden slick of fear/ across the shoulder blades, the ozone scrape/ of tooth on tooth, of knowledge on fast wings." The migratory metaphors stand out as well, particularly in relation to longing and desire: "Westward they'd say/ Send your people westward... Were we always this distant// Some days I wake/ And find you haven't followed." By the same token, the speaker makes clear that "it is not with me as it is with bridges." Miller deftly handles his poems' spiritual dimensions to amplify attentiveness to physical and metaphysical journeying, as "who/ can search for what is obvious?" (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly