In Nearby Bushes

by Kei Miller

The highly anticipated new collection from Forward Prize-winner Kei Miller, exploring landscape, legends and histories. Here is a world in which it is both possible to hide and to heal, a landscape as much marked by magic as it is by murder.

Genres: Poetry, Queer

64 pages, Paperback

First published August 8, 2019

About the author

Kei Miller was born in Jamaica in 1978. He completed an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and a PhD in English literature at the University of Glasgow. He works in multiple genres - poetry, fiction and non-fiction and has won major prizes across these genres. He won the Forward Prize for poetry and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. He has taught at the Universities of Glasgow, London, and Exeter. He is presently Professor of English at the University of Miami.

Reviews

[BookOfCinz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Growing up in Jamaica, whenever I turn on the news inevitably I would hear the News Reporter reference the following:
- Criminals escaping into nearby bushes
-Bodies found in nearby bushes
It was as if Jamaica was a series of "nearby bushes" which is why I think the title of Kei Miller's latest collection of poetry is so apt. In Nearby Bushes is a solid collection of poems that speaks to relevant issues in an intelligent, snarky, biting and hilarious way.

I recommend this!

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://youtu.be/j4jGfNsZ8sE

[2TReads · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection is layered and complex.

Growing up in Jamaica sounds like the ultimate vacation to a lot of outsiders, and on many levels it most certainly is. But my beautiful island also has dark and sinister undertones, areas, and persons. Nonetheless, my love and devotion for my island is paramount in my mind, behaviour and evocation.

In Kei Miller's 'in nearby bushes', he has taken a phrase that is embedded in every Jamaican's psyche, especially if you have watched any news coverage of a shootout or manhunt being carried out by our police force: ...and he ran off into nearby bushes..., ...the suspect escaped into nearby bushes... and so on.

Miller is one of the most prolific and talented writers I have ever come across. His experiences and spirit definitely leave an imprint on his work and it is crystal clear to all who read his works. With this collection of poems, one is hit immediately with the gravity of the subject that will be explored within each poem and we are not disappointed. Because as a native Jamaican to which this phrase 'in nearby bushes' has resonant and disturbing meanings, the mind and heart are instantly alert and engaged.

He speaks with a voice that commands you see the island, what she gives, takes, what she bears and bares. See the hidden things, the exposed things, the things taken for granted: her beauty, strength, lushness, fertility, barrenness, and ecological diversity. She is an island with secrets, keeps secrets, is secret. An island that entices, excites, and soothes.

I love the way Miller constructs his poems and poetry, they instruct, inform, evoke. They make the reader pay attention, read and reread, take a trip through time and space; they ask the reader to question the imagery, the name, the place, the experience. Each poem makes the reader see that no matter how much we think we know Place, understand Place, there will still be more Places to define, uncover, know.

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Do you know of Sally in the Woods, or another story like it? The murdered girl that roams the forest - this useless energy of ghosts. I mean to ask: what shall be the content of your haunting, what question will sustain the afterlife? Will it be the usual 'why me?' and 'how come? And will it move spectral amongst the bushes, like the white deer, or Sally at midnight? Or is this just the false way we imagine the dead - as beautifully hooved, or like vapour, and always asking the hard questions left us - this way we burden the lifeless with our most lively fears."

// In Nearby Bushes XI.I


In Nearby Bushes is a huge departure from the three other poetry collections that came before, yet in many ways, it is a culmination of them along with being a clear successor to Cartographer in terms of ideas. It is his most specific and carefully crafted collection yet, examining places as well as placelessness. Jamaica is at the heart of it and the bushes where all the crimes happen and into which all the criminals escape, both too often, are always in the vicinity, a periphery encroaching upon the center. The level of clarity & clear-eyed vision in the three distinct sections/sequences is stunning.

The first is the exploration of the "Here", the home and the hearth, ravaged by colonialism now reinventing itself & it resonates the most with Cartographer's aims. The second part is concerned with places and their names, how they change and evolve over time, the liminal and the marginal. The third drives straight to the crux of the matter and into the bushes to all that's happening in them and around them. It looks at all the stories underneath, attuned to the powerful pulse of the place, the open eye of the island. It is a superb poetry collection that tilts more towards prose poetry than verse but never cuts down lyricism, imagery, imagination.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Are there stories you have heard about Jamaica? / Well here are the stories underneath.” The last two lines of “The Understory” reveal Miller’s purpose in this, his fifth collection of poetry. The title is taken from Jamaican crime reports, which often speak of a victim’s corpse being dumped in, or perpetrators escaping to, “nearby bushes.” It’s a strange euphemism that calls to mind a dispersed underworld where bodies are devalued. Miller persistently contrasts a more concrete sense of place with that iniquitous nowhere. Most of the poems in the first section open with the word “Here,” which is also often included in their titles and repeated frequently throughout Part I. Jamaica is described with shades of green: a fertile, feral place that’s full of surprises, like an escaped colony of reindeer.

As usual, Miller slips in and out of dialect as he reflects on the country’s colonial legacy and the precarious place of homosexuals (“A Psalm for Gay Boys” is a highlight). Although I enjoyed this less than the other books I’ve read by Miller, I highly recommend his work in general; the collection The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion is a great place to start. (Releases August 29th.)

Some favorite lines:

“Here that cradles the earthquakes; / they pass through the valleys // in waves, a thing like grief, / or groaning that can’t be uttered.” (from “Hush”)

“We are insufficiently imagined people from an insufficiently imagined place.” (from “Sometimes I Consider the Names of Places”)

“Cause woman is disposable as that, / and this thing that has happened is … common as stone and leaf and breadfruit tree. You should have known.” (from “In Nearby Bushes” XIII.III)

[Kiki · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

Feels strange to rate this book. Like I'd be rating my life, which is not mine but is shared, and worried, and gnawed over, living Here (and in other Heres). For now, Miller took the best parts of Cartographer and went closer to the edges. I guess he is better at contemplating shallow graves than Zion.

Longer commentary in a few days, maybe.

[Breanne Ivor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am trying to stay healthy by eating fruits during this quarantine. And I'm keeping my mind healthy by reading great literature.

Enter in nearby bushes.

I heard Kei Miller read from his collection in New York. The reading was gorgeous; despite Kei being grievously offended when a fellow Jamaican claimed he read like a Trinidadian (the horror). Why do I love this collection? The language, the humour, the evolution of words and ideas across poems.

The Jamaica of this novel is a country once besieged by colonialism and now battered by crime. Criminals always seem to escape into nearby bushes, which are too dense and dark for policemen to pursue them through. Consider 'A thief, his pockets, and the rustle of seeds.' On the run from Babylon, he reaches into his pockets 'and throws the seeds. Look how before him sprouts the nearby bushes. Even on gravel. Even on rock. Even on the fourth floor of an office building in New Kingston. Always the thieves escape in nearby bushes.' As a Trinidadian (and therefore someone whose home has more than its fair share of escaped/escaping thieves and worse) this hit close to home.

[Shivanee Ramlochan · Rating 4 out of 5]

2024:

"Here that pulls the tears back into the soft
bodies of boys, & observe them -
their soft & spectacular bodies,

their spectacular bodices, the spectacular
corsets, the spectacular corpses. I want so much
to say this - that our bodies are spectacular

& not the harder truth - that our bodies
are spectacles; our deaths blossom like roses
in the dark garden behind the house."

Rage, in these poems of criminality, of killing and the unhealing wound of it. I despair in these poems, and am also held by them, by everything they see, by every hurt they will not let sleep. I trust Kei to show me what I need to live in that radical hurt, to stand here and survive it.

***

2019:

Review forthcoming, from adjacent foliage.

[Mar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I stuck a post it note in all my favourite ones and now there are post it notes sticking out of this little book at all angles.

[Stuart Page · Rating 5 out of 5]

I dipped into this once or twice, previously, well-meaning but unsure; this afternoon, I settled into it with a determination to read it from cover to cover. All at once it is vivid and intelligent. I really enjoyed it (if enjoyed is the right word to use, given the subject matter). Recommended!

[Rol-J Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Emotive. Emotional. Powerful. Potent. Deep. Wide.
This collection of poems by Kei Miller is simply brilliant. He uses the "in nearby bushes" go-to phrase of news stories from Jamaica where criminals always seem to escape into nearby bushes, but also that secrets are hidden or buried in nearby bushes. Miller uses excerpts of news reports and then creates his own excerpts of those excerpts to solidify his point of how there seems to be commonality in all these stories, pointing back to "here where" and "in nearby bushes". I recognise the use of the "here where" concept that explores the relevance of time and location; the places in Jamaica where so many secrets are buried in shallow graves, so shallow that the society can see them, but often chooses to ignore them. Overall, I think the book shows that the Caribbean, and Jamaica in particular, is a secret society. The only difference is that the secrets are all open.

[Never Without a Book · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful, funny and overall stimulating this collection will captivate you.

[Jherane Patmore · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the explorations of the psychological "nearby bushes", the physical "nearby bushes", and the nowhere-ness(?) of it.

I'll reread this often

[Will Quabbit · Rating 5 out of 5]

The word "fashionable" is horrible in this context, but "trauma poetry" whose topic is a terrible event that did not directly happen to the poet, but is poet-adjacent, has been all the rage. American examples could include Mai Der Vang's Yellow Rain, Don Mee Choi, even Ocean Vuong's first book. One could call this the poetry of witness, or collateral damage, or inherited trauma. In any case, both the event(s) in question and their relation to the poet - the proximity and/or distance - are central poles of poetic preoccupation.

Kei Miller's In Nearby Bushes focuses on the casual violence - rapes and murders - in his native Jamaica. All too frequently, a body has been dumped in nearby bushes. The direct impetus for this book, we learn, is a newspaper clipping. Though Jamaican and, because gay, penumbrated by the risk of casual violence, the motive having been a newspaper clipping puts an insurmountable distance between Miller and his subject.

This distance comes through in - and this is a horrible word in the context of the subject matter - in the book's charm. Miller only pushes lightly at the horror. We do come face to face with the grisly matter of the body, but only in a very few instances. In this sense, this book is a much lighter read than many others in the genre. But this lightness is part of the point, since it dovetails with societal disregard of the victims - a facet of Miller's subject. That quality of half being charmed and half appalled is very effective, and I think the essential quality of this book. One of the best contemporary works of poetry I've read in while.

[Bex · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really incredible poetry collection.

As a white British reviewer, I'm cautious to talk about the representation of Jamaica, but equally it's difficult to talk about this collection without talking about anything else! From my position it was a really interesting and eye-opening read, a massive experience and aspect of a country that never seems to be talked about, and that I would never have heard about were it not for this book.

I also really valued the examinations of place in general, looking at the ways that places develop and the collective understandings of place. When juxtaposed with the above, the amount of not-knowing that seems to exist around Jamaica in particular, it becomes a particularly fascinating exploration.

Lastly, I really appreciate the centring of the lives lost we don't talk about: the people who do not get international coverage, and what it is that links these people.

More than anything, this collection was a striking reminder of how nuanced and revolutionary poetry can be, how it can explore and challenge and educate and represent, all of these things whilst also sounding great!

Ooooh - some fantastic 'black-out'/found poetry sections also!

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a hard-hitting poetry collection inspired by reports of women being preyed on by men in nearby bushes, men using these bushes to hide or escape or sometimes women escaping from attacks through nearby bushes. Keith Miller wants to expose the reader to the 'real' Jamaica, as he sees it, a view that is often hidden.

This collection was a bit hit or miss for me. The premise is a really interesting thread for a collection, but some of the poem's felt a bit samey as a result. There were some lines I loved, but the enthusiasm engendered by this was hampered by their fleeting nature:


“Here that cradles the earthquakes; / they pass through the valleys // in waves, a thing like grief, / or groaning that can’t be uttered.”

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“These things I know as much as you: how morning comes, that brightening of sky; [...] to simply be in the world, wrapped by an unbothered sky.” The recent collection from Kei Miller, In Nearby Bushes, is preoccupied with place and violence — the violence that happens to constitute the parameters of a place, and the violence that is subsequently allowed by such parameters. Landscapes can be full of hope, healing, light — but they threaten constant peril, as many places to hide for safety as for nefarious subterfuge, “the unplotted plot, the intriguing / twist of vines, the messy dialogue — just listen”.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Nearby Bushes takes its title from a phrase that frequently occurs in Jamaican news reports. A place where people flee, commit atrocities, or die. But it is also a place where a colony of 6000 escaped reindeer live, and where the Maroons, escaped slaves, found safety. Having heard Kei read from this excellent collection, I had his voice and intonations in my head whenever I was reading these poems, giving it additional resonance. Not always pleasant topics, and a darker tone than previous books of Kei's that I have read, with violence and threat just out of sight, in nearby bushes.

[Shirley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written. Heartbreaking. The poetry speaks to the violence in Jamaica and the crimes perpetrated "In Nearby Bushes". Kei Miller is a master of words.

I especially enjoyed it because I visited Jamaica many years ago with my young daughter. To this day we remember that trip as one of our favorites. We found the people to be hospitable and warm-hearted. But evidently Jamaica has become a dangerous place, especially for the locals.

If you like this book of poetry, read Miller's novel Augustown.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This poetry collection builds on Miller's previous work in The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, in that it's steeped in the Jamaican landscape. He takes his title 'in nearby bushes' from Jamaican news reports where the phrase is used repeatedly to describe the escape of criminals, a place where violence takes place and the evidence is buried. It's a dark book, and the bushes become a liminal, unmappable place. The collection is so coherent with a repetitive 'Here....Here...' regularly throughout, centring the idea of place and how we negotiate it.

[Corri Latapy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this book on a weekend getaway. I really loved Jamaican culture since my last visit there. This book felt like a second visit. Even though some parts are dark, it's authentic. I really loved this work from Kei Miller and I look forward to reading more from him.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

First came across Kei Miller at StAnza poetry festival where I was taken aback by how vivid and clear his poetry is. Scenes rolling before my mind as if watching a film rather than listening to poetry I'd never heard before.

This collection is dark but beautiful and moving.

[Ki · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite collection to date. I’ve reread it so many times— SO MANY TIMES. You really have to SIT with it because every piece evokes somethings heavy. As a Jamaican, you can identify everything in the writing but it’s so defamiliarised to point where it appears folkloric. Beautiful.

[Karen A. Lloyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whew. Will definitely be rereading this.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

So happy to have read this; so sad that it's over.

[Josie Rushin · Rating 3 out of 5]

compulsory reading for my Black British literature module. a poetry collection which explores Jamaica and ideas of colonisation through the changing of names. it also uses real newspaper cuttings to explore how and why stories are told. i would recommend this to anyone interested in learning about Jamaica through poetry.

[Penny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lyrical and rhythmic poetry collection with some really great moments.

[Alice Horncastle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting, thought-provoking, and emotive poetry collection about Jamaica, focusing on themes of place, language, identity, and crime. I would recommend it and I would definitely read it again.