This slight volume by the Millsaps College professor, with its
semi-formal verse, strikes a generally elegiac tone while brooding
over the conflicts of being gay, southern, and religious. "Word,"
in particular, sets the absolutist anti-gay sentiments of the
Baptist South in the historical context of justifying slavery, and
imagines suicide as one sad solution. Quieter poems create a
collage of memories: doing farm chores with his father, his father
cleaning corn husks for kindling, dressing chickens with his
grandmother. The barnyard violence of "Original Sin" intrudes on an
idyll of drinking fresh milk from the source, and the poet begins
his deathwatches for friends and relatives, from stroke, old age,
and AIDS. Northern places provide natural solace also, from
clam-digging in New England to the image of an abandoned glass
house, merging with its surroundings. Homosexuality here means both
the sadness of a young boy exploited by his predatory teacher
("Poem") and the lusts of an adult for a "muscular, bare chested"
but wild "Panhandler." At worst, student-profound, Miller's modest
verse occasionally rises to a hymnlike beauty. (Kirkus Reviews)
The poems in "Iron Wheel" are hard won, the product of the clash of
cultures: Southern, religious, gay. Miller achieves an intense,
disturbing, and singular poetic voice, capable of tenderness, but
undaunted when forced to confront the harsh, often violent
realities of contemporary life in the South.
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