Blame Yourself

by Philip Miller

40 pages, Paperback

Published October 6, 2024

About the author

This is the disambiguation profile for otherwise undifferentiated authors publishing as Philip Miller.

Reviews

[Ewan Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who doesn’t want to read poems about the vampire “fixed / to a long unlife by an iron pin”? Who doesn’t want their heart shredded by the realisation that “all my dreams of flying, / were my father carrying me to bed”? The poems in this powerful collection tangle us up in nature’s detailed confusion with birds building nests in “the shreds of former trees, / bindings, moss and leaves”. They toss us carelessly about like the ingredients of a mixed salad in the lives of people in chronic pain, paths on which forgotten history is written, Paris streets where a crowd of washed faces gather. There’s something particularly visual here, I think. I pictured everything as I read from the lift stuck with an empty wheelchair in Darlington Memorial Hospital to the fox in the lane “slight as a / lean comma”. The language is spare and clear but reaches out to all kinds of worlds to create its highly original meaning, “the Tudor wood is soft / with mould, and faceless / eyes fleet as swallows / swim in the porous red walls”. My defences were entirely undone by the last lines of the final poem so I encourage you to buy a copy of Blame Yourself and keep it by your bedside, “If such words are never read, / are they ever really meant.”