Overtime

by Joseph Millar

Overtime, Joseph Millar’s first book of poetry, both traditionally elegiac and formally unexpected―aims at the overlap between art and the everyday grind of work and single fatherhood. Here we find poems of loss and grief, alongside poems of working-class celebration that hum with the sound of wind in the ladder racks and miles of telephone wire. Overtime is a book of poetry whose chief concern is not art for its own sake but rather the artistic visions the everyday struggles of life provide when paid the right attention. A poet deeply sunk into William Carlos Williams’ American Grain, Millar grounds his poems in the details and small mysteries of everyday life and labor. Whether the speaker is murmuring a song to the beloved in poems like “Love Pirates” or “Listener,” imagining the travails of a Native American war chief in “Sitting Bull in Canada,” or considering his own inevitable death in “Heart Attack,” Millar tells a story plainly, moving from lyric to narrative and back again in language charged with duende and force. As Yusef Komunyakaa has written, “Millar is a poet we can believe.”

Genres: Poetry

72 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.