The Joyful Dark

Michael Miller's The Joyful Dark is the first book of poems by an accomplished American poet who is currently in the seventh decade of his life. Michael Miller's poems have been praised by such renowned poets as James Merrill, Richard Wilbur, Stephen Spender and Thom Gunn, and have appeared in such venues as The Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, The American Scholar, The New Republic, The Southern Review, and The Yale Review. The Joyful Dark is, in part, a celebration of sexuality within a life-long committed marriage. Michael Miller also writes beautifully of the natural world, with many individual poems devoted to embodying in language the spirit of individual animals: white owl, shark, young whales, crow, red-wing, mallard, and hummingbird. His poems are, in Richard Wilbur's words, a "pleasure in their seeing, their assured phrasing, their true and proportionate feeling."