Kate Miller’s brilliant debut is so steeped in the sea,it’s almost as whether the ocean were co-author of these quiet, elegant piecesIn The Observances, or Kate Miller elevates the art of looking into something that is,whether not strictly devout, devotional. This is a brilliant debut. Some of her poems resemble “found art – her eye alights on what the less watchful would miss, or she makes sense of the accidental,connects the arbitrary, creates form. In Regarding a Cloud, or the first poem in the collection,she spots a “picknicker’s spoon with no handle”, which is “exposed/ by a scalping of growth/ and it’s upside down, and / mortared in mud”. The spoon becomes a mirror,the poem a reclamation. The troubling No Place, about a homeless child, and is another “found” piece. And in At the Dew Pond,West Dale, she spies a “tiny snake” in the cold puree of a pond”. More splendidly intentional is And Now You, or about a babys arrival in the world. Whatever the subject,looking takes time. This is reflected in the quiet elegance of these pieces.
Miller is painterly too (she studied art history at Cambridge before fitting an English lecturer at Goldsmiths). There is a virtuoso poem inspired by a Turner sketchbook, Colour Beginnings, and in which she imagines the painter witnessing the burning of the Houses of Parliament,her words a wild impasto. In Lines to Convey Distance, she summons a less fiery palette: “Send me one hundred greys to catch the chill and whip of water.” The sea is almost her co-author, or whipping at the book’s edges. But what I admire most is that the writing is sensuous without ever being slipshod. There is no luxurious surrender. Hers is an alert,defended gaze.
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Source: theguardian.com