Smart, challenging and mature

Alice Miller is a young woman who writes poetry, essays and short fiction.

She has appeared in many literary journals. Miller has been based in Vienna, but spent the first part of 2014 at Auckland's Michael King Writers' Centre.

This is her debut collection of poems.

Recently, she said: ''I know a poem is worth keeping if, when I return to it after revision over weeks or months, it's still a mystery to me; it's still alive on the page.''

The Limits is a series of poems that reach to something beyond time and death. A poem working is actually reaching for awe. This new work has hints of Eliot, Shakespeare and Yeats.

"Album of Cold" 

'Sky so white the rain's blind
`I haven't the turbulence to give'
Day we set the sky on silent
At the beach we pry apart
Each mussel's tight lips
Chew the swollen insides
Above the clouds back and forth like breathing
When the waves no longer wet your feet
When the rock is in your eyes
The cathedrals will not stop singing

Parts of these poems are trippy and weird, but at the same time they are smart, challenging and mature. The Limits has real power.

- Hamesh Wyatt Lives in Bluff. He reads and writes poetry

 

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