David Miller: Reassembling Still: Collected Poems

David Miller, Reassembling Still: Collected Poems, Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2014. ISBN 978-1-84681-331-7. 316pp. £14.95.
 
David Miller was born in Melbourne (Australia) in 1950, and has lived in London since 1972. His more recent publications include The Waters of Marah (Shearsman Books, 2005), The Dorothy and Benno Stories (Reality Street Editions, 2005), In the Shop of Nothing: New and Selected Poems (Harbor Mountain Press, 2007) and Black, Grey and White: A Book of Visual Sonnets (Veer Books, 2011). He has compiledBritish Poetry Magazines 1914-2000: A History and Bibliography of ‘Little Magazines’ (with Richard Price, The British Library / Oak Knoll Press, 2006) and edited The Lariat and Other Writings by Jaime de Angulo (Counterpoint, 2009) and The Alchemist’s Mind: a book of narrative prose by poets (Reality Street, 2012). Spiritual Letters (Series 1-5) appeared from Chax Press in 2011, and a double CD recording of David Miller reading this same work came out from LARYNX in 2012. He is also a musician and a member of the Frog Peak Music collective.
 
Comprising work from the early 1970s onwards, Reassembling Still is by far the largest and most comprehensive collection of David Miller’s poetry, and includes all of his poetry that he wishes to keep, with the exceptions of the ongoing Spiritual Letters project and his visual poems.
 
In a statement published in Poetry Salzburg Review, Miller wrote: “I am not at all interested in the idea of taking something – some pre-existing ‘content’ – and presenting it in a persuasive and gratifying manner. I’m interested in working with what I don’t know, in the sense that the writing involves a process of discovery – hopefully also opening up a process of discovery for the reader. What I want is an exploratory poetry – a poetry that seeks to discover, explore and deal with the unfamiliar – with what would normally be hidden or invisible.”

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