Against the Simple

by Robert Miltner

"What continues to affect me in Robert Miltner's Against the Simple is the silence that haunts the edges of experience and meaning. Like the lonely streetscapes of Giorgia De Chirico, Miltner's poems, often cast in brief sentences surrounded by an eerie quiet, haunt us with the unseen and the unheard which seem to lurk just around the corners of language and consciousness. Often his images 'tease us out of thought.' In poems like 'Eating Alone' the uncanny strangeness is almost hallucinatory. 'How true is the algebra of emptiness?' House Noises at Night asks. These dreamingly attentive, watching and listening poems are kind of answer." -Richard Hague

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Robert Miltner is Professor Emeritus of English at Kent State University Stark. He is the author of Ohio Apertures: A Lyric Memoir (Cornerstone Press) and a short story collection, And Your Bird Can Sing (Bottom Dog Press). His poetry collections are Hotel Utopia (New Rivers Press), Orpheus & Echo (Etruscan Press), Against the Simple (Kent State University Press), Queen Mab and the Moon Boy (Kattywompus Press), and Cicatrix Vortex Codex (MadHat Press), forthcoming in 2024. Miltner received an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center, a Writer-in-Residence at the Chautauqua Institution, and was visiting scholar on contemporary American poetry at University of Paris East.