Overtime

by Joseph Millar

Joseph Millar's poems come out of the American landscape like runaway diesel trucks loaded with miners, electricians, waitresses, ditch diggers, mechanics, factory workers, the homeless, the hopeless, and the lost. These are the voices poetry has classically ignored, finally speaking to us through Millar's expertly detailed lines. Here is the poetry of work, its dignity, pain, pathos, and oppression rendered in poems so tight they tick like clocks, or bombs. Joseph Millar grew up in Pennsylvania and received an MA degree from Johns Hopkins University. He spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay area, working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines and he has won fellowships from Montalvo Center for the Arts and from Oregon Literary Arts. He now teaches at Mount Hood Community College, in Oregon.

Genres: Poetry

61 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2001

Reviews

[Timothy Juhl · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm reading poetry while I pedal my ass at the gym, biking nowhere fast. It seems as good way to pass those endless minutes and poetry is brief enough to complete a poem and not lose your line and have to search for where you left off.

Millar's poetry excites me, his language is steeped in the coal country of his childhood, his nomadic life in the west from California to Alaska, fishing and fixing telephone cables. There is rust and drinking and absent women and neglectful fathers. Yet in every poem, Millar reminds the reader that this is just one life and it isn't over until it's over and there are hundreds of chances to change things, another road to take, another job waiting. Always there is hope that things will be better later.

[Drabekate]

I return to Millar's work frequently. I like the groundedness of his poems, the way he stays with his image of the world: From "After Listening to a Lecture on Form." "I'm afraid of the mountains/in this thin glacial air,/of going to sleep in their shadow, that the granite inside them/and the threats of bright metal/may not hold once the night comes.
I'm afraid of so many people talking,/the cat smile of the poetry scholar, his ridged skull./When he spoke of measure/I could feel my wristwatch tighten,/remembered the payments coming due/on my daughter's tuition.
I went down by the horses./Birds were walking in the hay/beside the feet of the Appaloosa./ He looked at me sideways/in the swaying dusk./The wheels of his jawbones./the great vein in his face.

Sometimes I can hardly breathe.

[Ami · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisite eye for detail and a piercing sensitivity make this book an exceptional read. The lush imagery evokes a feeling of immediacy.I especially loved "Outside Monterey" and "Autumn Rainfall." Beautiful work.

[Jerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a six-month period I worked overtime. Now I'm on vacation.

[Cody Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's as if a Philip Levine poem meets a Ray Carver story. Great stuff.