Poet & essayist Kathryn MacDonald has posted a new review of “Bone Antler Stone” … Go and read it here, and check out the rest of her site… (& you can still order copies of the book here):

Kathryn MacDonald's avatarKathryn MacDonald

Tim Miller collapses 30,000 years of archaeology into a poetry collection that feels the thrill of immediate experience. He stirs a bit of magic, weaving it into the facts of what we know from long-past history.

In “Chauvet, Lascaux, Altamira” (France and Spain, 35,000 – 12,000 BC), Miller writes: Now we come to paint with light and fire. In this seven-part poem, we go beyond the images and enter the process of painting them:

A bison made with his hands, white hands dipped in red
And palms slapped on cold rock again and again,
Smacked hands turned or righted or angles
And his exhausted step back to see
The animal made only of red palms and rock,
Red like bison’s blood, stone vitality,
His awe at a heartbeat behind the wall,
And his hands red as a midwife’s.

The poet does not stand back, merely to look in wonder and…

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#222: Seamus Heaney – 10 Essential Poems Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 8/25/23: Tonight, I read ten essential poems from one of the great and most public poets of the last seventy years, Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). It isn’t hard to come by details of Heaney’s life, but ⁠Stepping Stones⁠ (where Heaney is interviewed at length in what amounts to an autobiography), is a good place to start. His poems are collected in ⁠100 Poems⁠, and in the ⁠individual collections⁠.There are many ways to look at Heaney’s work, and the ten poems I choose only present one picture: a poet as at home on the farm as he was at Harvard; as interested in literary history as in archaeology and the deep interior of the Irish imagination; as concerned with childhood, memory, and family as with the darkest aspects of human life. In introducing these poems, I reflect on Heaney’s importance in my own life, and the huge impact his death had on me, ten years ago this month.The poems I read are:  Personal Helicon (Death of a Naturalist, 1966)The Forge and Bogland (Door into the Dark, 1969)The Tollund Man (Wintering Out, 1972)The Strand at Lough Beg (Field Work, 1979)Squarings #2, #8, #40 (Seeing Things, 1991)from his translations of Beowulf (1999)Uncoupled (Human Chain, 2010)  The episode ends with Heaney's reading of "The Tollund Man."The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts. Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.
  1. #222: Seamus Heaney – 10 Essential Poems
  2. #221: Volcanoes, Plagues & the Childhood of a Kabbalist
  3. #220: The working poor and a so-so murder show
  4. #219: When a paragraph changes your life
  5. #218: Poetry to Live By
  6. #217: Voices from 1900-1914
  7. #216: Poets, Prophets, Seeresses & Goddesses from Time & the River
  8. #215: 8 Favorite Poems from "Time and the River"
  9. #214: Two of the Best Poems You've Never Heard of (by William Cullen Bryant)
  10. #213: Van Gogh's Early Years

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