A Palace of Pearls

by Jane Miller

“Book by book, Jane Miller has evolved a mode, a voice, a palette and landscape entirely her own. If she were a painter, one might describe it as a descendant of cubism, a composition of multiple planes and reflections that appears to emerge out of itself, true to laws of its own nature, and yet is disturbingly recognizable, continuously suggestive, intimate and beautiful. Her subject is love and illusion and their revelation about each other.”—W. S. Merwin “Reading Jane Miller’s poetry is like channel-surfing on acid.”— L.A. Weekly Jane Miller is a traveler stimulated by ideas beyond our immediate sphere. In this book-length sequence animated and propelled by a confrontation with her dead father, she meditates on home, love, war and the responsibility of the poet. A Palace of Pearls is inspired by one of the most spectacular civilizations in history, the Arab kingdom of Al-Andalus—a Middle Age civilization where architecture, science and art flourished and Christians, Jews and Muslims lived in relative harmony. The reader roams through “rooms,” encountering Greek, Judaic and Roman mythology, and through the streets of fifteenth-century Spain and contemporary Rome in Miller’s most personal and associative volume. From A Palace of Pearls We bow our heads
for the ancient draping of the gardenia lei in the hotel lobby
and are relieved of our possessions as per a reminder
that one must enter Paradise a little naked Jane Miller is the author of eight previous books of poetry and essays. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award. She lives in Tucson and teaches in the creative writing program at The University of Arizona, having served as the program’s director from 1999–2003.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2005

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. This is Jane^^^^^Miller

Reviews

[Wyatt · Rating 4 out of 5]

there comes a reckoning that it might be a failure

to theorize and anyway what's art

all about if it merely lengthens the shadows

that make the cowards evil and the poet immortal

I always feel an instinctive aversion to poems without punctuation (thanks, Rupi Kaur), but the way Miller uses language in this collection has shown me the error of my ways. There are some truly affecting poems and turns of phrase in here. I think the overall conceit of the collection--an association between the text of the poems and the Moorish fortress of Alhambra--feels a bit tenuous overall. There are some poems where the connection is made more explicit, but other poems don't reference Alhambra at all, or at least not in a way that a Luddite like myself could see it. This thematic dissonance is the only thing keeping me from calling this a 5-star read, and I'm willing to chalk it up to shortcomings in my own understanding.

By and large, these poems are incredible. 4.5/5

[Paula Koneazny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Miller’s poetry here strikes me as cumulative as well as accumulative. Significance accrues as one reads through the collection. In this sense, her poems function somewhat like the prose in a novel of ideas, both self-reflective and outward-looking. A Palace of Pearls is comprised of thirty-four numbered poems plus a coda, that is, the numerals 1-34 function as titles. The last line of each of the numbered poems is written in capital letters. These lines in turn form, in numerical order, the lines of the final poem entitled “Coda,” a formal choice that highlights the inseparability of one poem from another.
Miller's writing is elegant, but does not grasp at the gorgeous in language; this is poetry to be felt and thought with one's eyes wide open, not poetry that makes one swoon. All to the better, since this is no romanticized retreat into what Yves Bonnefoy (writing about the French romantics) called the “pretentiousness of the me,” even though Miller doesn’t hesitate to make use of the raw material of her personal life. This is not Language poetry either, even though it is intimately about the using and uses of language and the very notion and nature of use: what is the use of poetry? what does poetry do or accomplish?, how does (or should) a poet engage notions of culpability and responsibility vis-à-vis her world, her situation? In "21" she says, “people are cut they’re frightened/ they want to know why they want to know/ where they are dying well aware/ it is not in this poem”. There is an element of reportage in A Palace of Pearls, the eye of the journalist (from the root meaning daily) issuing field reports on art, architecture, history, love, and war. Numerous themes or “subjects” weave in and out, among which are the painters Goya and Caravaggio (shadows), Andalusia, the Alhambra, the poet Lorca (it is a household employee of his family who enacts for him and his brother the tale of the Palace of Pearls), the Inquisition (and by extension, the Holocaust), the poet’s dying/ dead father, the poet’s girlfriend on a trip to Italy, Naples (Caravaggio was stranded in Naples), Pompeii and Rome, the Arizona desert, and a honeymoon in Hawaii. Even though Miller claims in "22" that “history is the last thing poems should tell/ and stories next to last so poetry is all/ a scent of berry like a splash of destiny/ which hints at the best of life and after its small/ thrill passes like a small lost civilization/ it can be solace and sadness as well . . . . the poem restores nothing,” I think that A Palace of Pearls, its art, landscapes and travel memoirs included, admirably succeeds in bearing witness.

[Nicola · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems explode. They start in one place and end up in a totally different one, spanning times, places, people, emotions. There is an eery flow to the book; a stream-of-consciousness without a defined, mastermind conscious. One could argue that the poet is this guiding conscious, but though Miller seems to insert herself on a personal, emotional level at times, there are such leaps on different registers that it becomes more. Style heightens this ultimate expansiveness: the spaces between the lines, the unharnessed grammar (no commas, no question marks, no periods), and the strange CAPS that end each poem. Only later do we learn that these final lines also belong to another, final poem. They are pieces that make up several wholes. The caps were hard to read at first. They read like slogans. They have a heavy, powerful, and intrusive presence; an enactment of hierarchy, the Inquisition, the numerous references to war. But they also become a way of collecting, building, working towards a crescendo, and, ultimately, of listening. After several references to EARS, I finally saw the "ear" in the title: a palace of pEARls. So, yes, this book is about the poet, his/her attention to sound, but also politics. The line about poets as aristocrat's asses hovers over the book as the poet ventures into and through and beyond the political and the personal. Miller places the room back into rooms.

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not for me, personally. Lots of lines and moments I appreciated but I didn't find that the poems supported the supposed premise of the collection (the palace of the Alhambra and the Al-Andalus kindgom). I'm not really an associative poetry person.

[Dawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

A Palace of Pearls is based upon the Middle Age Arab kingdom of Al-Andalus which was a pleasure palace/fortress ("a model for ethnic tolerance") that fell during the Spanish inquisition. Jane uses it as a political and aesthetic architecture in order to investigate our current political crises(eh) and personal notions of the past and present.

Miller also follows Federico García Lorca’s relationship to these Moorish legends, and the politics that led to his assassination.

Jane does create an almost physical stride through the book. There's an exertion that puts a lot of pressure on the reader. To a fault I think. No meditation. No stopping for anything. Jane does not dwell in these poems, she doesn't live in the architecture she works so hard to create (or re-create or whatever). She's just continuously toppling and rebuilding these instances, sort of turning them into steam. But steam does not a poem make. So ehh. Two stars.

[Donald · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had been putting off reading this book for two years really, as someone had called it "tame"--a terrible adjective & not one I was prepared to associate with Jane Miller. Post-read, the adjective I'd use is "full"; the book has a true emotional depth, some sort of wisdom, that I haven't often found in my poem-reading. It's a fullness that is easy only when one is talking to close friends or family, when one puts down one's showmanship and feels no need to exaggerate.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book has a fine start. Self-conscious of the fragment by mentioning harmony and the evolution of harmony. Then she brings up her father. And the many different registers just seem to going along fine. But then the book gets distracted about midway through, and by the time of the "Note on the Cover and the Title," the book is about Rome and Moorish architecture.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm reading this a little at a time as I have the time. So far I'm enjoying it.

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Refers to Lorca. Fun structure - "coda" is amalgam of each poem's last line. Sometimes I'm not sure I like her complex abstract word choices. Last line in caps, maybe an overkill.

[Don · Rating 4 out of 5]

just like all of Jane Miller's books it's totally fascinating also different than the others a book length poem, great from beginning to end.