Modern Age - Summer 2016 - 125

REVIEWS

sen from these proposed books-Arriving on Time, The Heart's
Arithmetic, and The World That Isn't There-make up sections 2, 3,
and 4 of Selected Poems.
There is both continuity and difference in Mills's earlier and
later poems. Among the later poems are character studies similar
to those of the orphans of modernity sympathetically portrayed
in the earlier verse. There are also poems on family members, but
in place of honoring his mother, father, or a grandfather Mills now
celebrates domestic life with his wife, son, and daughter.
Most noticeably, though, Mills in the later poems engages
more directly, more often, and at greater length with interrelated
philosophical questions that are certainly present in the earlier
poems yet not as dominant or as explicitly and fully treated. These
concerns include the mysterious relationship between memory,
time, and eternity; the kinship of words and things; the meaning
and consequences of Eden and the Fall; the role of the poet as
"linker"; and the ways in which metaphor and etymology trace
roots and branches of human and natural history back to, yet also
onward toward, a primal place faintly discerned as a wind on the
verge of articulation, whispering in Eden's trees.
Since my memorial essay dealt at length with the earlier orphan
poems, I will comment on only two of the poems included here
from Light for the Orphans. These are poems that preliminarily
explore major themes of the later poems.
In "Mockingbird Boy," the boy of the title hears the songs of
mockingbirds and picks out notes from their songs on the piano.
Both birds and boy are artists who imitate what they remember:
His music comes from listening
To mockingbirds reciting songs
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Modern Age - Summer 2016

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