Stromata

Poems that sift and resift the lessons of perception, of "raw" experience, but in order to open them into more complex compounds of vision, emotion and thought. Webs of vivid epiphanies probe the human story and the sensuous worldwith the aim of defining just what it means to be alive, and think.

David Miller was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1950 and has lived in London since 1972. A book of interviews and articles on his work, At the Heart of Things, was been published by Stride in 1994.

"Connectivity between world and language stands at the center of Stromata, but words do not necessarily pre-empt the physical realm so much as preserve some of its rapidly disappearing facets.... Miller's is a kind of poesie noire, an urban poetry of shadows and glimpses, street lamps and whispers. The crucial relationship beween word and life is ultimately mysterious, inimitable and unknowable, yet its existence surfaces most convincingly in the poem, the made object.... Each of these demanding books sustains a life of its own, one that readers can share."
– Fred Muratori, American Book Review

"...engages the reader's sense of narrative inevitability.... Miller heightens the ambiguity in each thought, line, and image so that they glide together in non-hierarchical, energetic ways."
– Susan Smith Nash, Witz

"David Miller searches for the ineffable, for indices of being (not W.C.Williams' 'ideas') among things. He is phenomenologist rather than semiotician. The codes are to be broken (apart) rather than decoded, since we cannot know what it was that was encoded in the first price.... Miller has absorbed the aesthetics of the Objectivists and is one of the few to hive adopted this without turning it into a national pastoralism of flower poems or delicate transcriptions of inconsequential occurrences."
– Robert Sheppard