Nowhere Nearer
Alice Miller
A second collection by one of New Zealand’s most powerful young voices, now out in the wide world
Doesn’t language get tired?
Doesn’t it get sick of
lulling us into believing
all the **** we say?
Isn’t love also the kind of cruelty
you give to someone because you can’t hold
all that cruelty in your own hands?
All I know’s I’m overflowing.
All I know’s I’m overflowing and I’m not sure
how much of me the world can hold. – From ‘Epilogue’
In Nowhere Nearer Alice Miller takes us inside a European world full of ruins and memories, haunted by Sigmund Freud and Eva Braun, betrayals and loss. Miller’s poetry is clear and brittle, full of glass doors that spit the sun back. It is deeply ruminative, rich with the circularity of thought, the company of the dead, and the lure of alternative futures.
Since you left me I walk around here a lot.
I’m not dead, either. To be not dead,
I claim, is the most marvellous thing in the world.
These poems rip into pockets of histories, trying to change facts and voices, searching for the word’s version of music’s home key. They dare you to visit, through a series of cities, the futures we never let happen.
Author
More about Alice Miller
Extract
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Reviews
Her poems are clear, brittle and full of thought. Her imagination hits overdrive repeatedly. - Hamesh Wyatt, Otago Daily Times