Walking into Daylight by Basia Miller

The original poems and translations in Basia Miller’s Walking into Daylight are exquisite meditations on the multiplicity of the world and one observant person’s response to it. Grounded in natural world experiences, they continually surprise with their poetic strategies and satori-like insight. Her poems puzzle over the counter-intuitive growth of honeysuckles and dwell in the “timeless space/of dew-dappled ferns.” She honors working persons–the sharp gardener, the “ministers of roofing,” her grandmother doing laundry with buckets of water and bars of lye soap. In unexpected ways, Miller’s poems meld down-to-earth-problems, such as perforated tires and “unhoused umbrellas,” to spiritual considerations. Her poems are big enough to contain a range from tragedy to bliss, and personal enough to invite the reader into them with their well-crafted language.

–Donald Levering, winner of the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize and the author of Any Song Will Do and Coltrane’s God.

Lyric and evocative, these poems track moments of perception in both inner and outer worlds. The poet may not own a literal compass, but is indeed good at locating us in our complex human situation. Nature and the wellspring of language—including translation—are companions on this path. Time spent with these poems has enlightened and refreshed me.

–Miriam Sagan

With Walking Into Daylight, Basia Miller grants us a window into one woman’s journey to connect with the particular beauty and the just-out-of-sight meaning of a life lived with vivid observation and heart. Her keen sensory pictures and honest confessions of their impacts open us to a dancing truth, inviting us to touch the multi-layered life we share and wish to understand in the reflection of each other. Curl up in a comfortable chair with a cup of tea and enjoy this traverse of the meeting of the ordinary and the profound.

–Julie Tato, mindfulness meditation leader, Lama Foundation

Set in American and foreign locales and voices, in response to works of art, in translated poems and her own sensuous and sonic lines, Basia Miller gathers the daily alongside memory and history. In poems that are playful and poems that are somber with loss, Miller does “the first necessary thing, . . . to bring one woman back to life.”  In poems that celebrate, “Though scarcity . . . haunts like a second nature,” this collection is abundant with delight and wisdom. The poet asks, “Can one’s footsteps be both delicate and firm?”

“Walking Into Daylight” is the answer.

–Barbara Rockman, author of to cleave, and Sting and Nest