Route 66 and Its Sorrows

Carolyn Miller is a lyric poet of redeeming grace and intense clarity. Her poems are grounded in a sense of the marvelous, as if viewing life through a jewel, transforming the dark world of memory and desire into a luminous presence. She is a master of distilled moments. The mood of the poems in Route 66 and Its Sorrows is both elegiac and celebratory. She returns us to what is nurturing in our lives and in the world: “everywhere / cicadas and crickets are rasping out their brief sentient lives, / and off in the woods a whippoorwill keeps calling / that each moment is sweeter and more precious / than any you will ever taste again.” I read her poems with admiration and deep pleasure.—Joseph Stroud