Star Map

In STAR MAP Nancy Anne Miller writes through the four seasons of Northwestern Connecticut beginning with winter in "It Hints of Madness" with "icicles/ drooling from roofs, constant snow/ a kind of foaming" and ending in autumn, when she opens the poem "Tonic" with "Who knew death could dazzle?" These poems cover the decades Miller has lived in a bucolic setting. They show her early alignment with the British School of Martian Poetry and the years she learned to interpret the seasons through Dickey's "adventure of metaphor." In the poem "Star Map," "The frost on my windshield with/ connecting white stellar shapes is/ a star map to guide me." The collection steadily maps a Bermudian poet coming to terms with a new country where New England is "Not England" and instead is a place: "four full/ seasons the terrain changes into, / a mad search for identity and whom to be."