Thunderbird

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.