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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#230 – The mythology of the bear, and Byron gets apocalyptic Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 5/18/26: Tonight I read about the bear in folklore and mythology from two books everybody should have on their shelves: the Taschen Book of Symbols and the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols. Browsing through either puts you in contact with our best stories and, with the Taschen book, some of our best artwork.Next, I read Lord Byron’s (1788-1824) apocalyptic poem Darkness from 1816. You can read more about the volcanic eruption that inspired poem, and produced the “year without summer,” here.Finally, I read a few passages on revelation and the religious experience from the rabbi, theologian and civil rights activist Abraham Joshua Heshel’s (1907-1962) God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism.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. #230 – The mythology of the bear, and Byron gets apocalyptic
  2. #229 : Mother Earth and myths of mining and agriculture
  3. #228 – What Ted Bundy did on July 14, 1974
  4. #227 – The Great Fire of London and the destruction of Jerusalem
  5. #226: The Vitality and terror of cities
  6. #225 – The invention of the wheel, and the power of storytelling
  7. #224: Let's talk about William Blake
  8. #223 – How to write two novels at the same time, with Charles Dickens
  9. #222: Seamus Heaney – 10 Essential Poems
  10. #221: Volcanoes, Plagues & the Childhood of a Kabbalist

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