Modern Age - Summer 2016 - 129

REVIEWS

craft of a cradle maker: "The walnut whispers and the starlight
croons. / I'll make this cradle by the sky and swing / Our child to
what the constellations sing."
This skill in woodworking shows, as do so many of his poems,
Wilmer Mills's deep roots in the Southern Agrarian tradition. In
"Rest Stop, Alabama," Mills takes a break at a truck stop. Automatically flushing urinals, the "sticky sentiments / Of country
music," "You Are Here!" marked on a map, and a button-activated
weather news device leave the farmer-poet thinking how neither
he nor migrating birds need such things:
Back in my truck I hang my head out, looking
More at the constellations than the road
As if to follow my nose and navigate
From star to star, as the crow flies, like geese
And all the hordes of fowl that need no sign
To beat the shortest course from A to Z.

This poem is a worthy addition to the Southern Agrarian writers'
analysis and criticism of modernity.
Section 3, from The Heart's Arithmetic, and section 4, from The
World That Isn't There, complete Selected Poems with a further
generous sampling of some of the best of the later verse.
"From Lookout Mountain at Night," in section 3, is one of Mills's
most impressive poems. Descending by car with his family from
the mountain into Chattanooga, Mills hears his son compare the
city lights below to Christmas lights while he himself thinks of the
bright lines as similar to lines on a person's palm but "enlarged /
Like a traffic map, each intersection lit / In different colors." These
multiple comparisons lead to what are perhaps Mills's deepest
moder nagejour nal .com

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Modern Age - Summer 2016

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