Wherever You Lay Your Head

Poetry. Jorie Graham says of this poet: Jane Miller is an extraordinary poet … an astoundingly supple voice. Her seventh collection of poems is in part a literary homage to Hiroshige, Japan’s master print artist who immortalized scenes along the Tokaido, the Eastern Sea Road. One obeys nature and thinks of the rest of the journey/ in straw sandals and a paper hat. The leaves larger/ and light longer. I could do it in my sleep,/ my head a roadway peppered with mountain passes (Rising Smoke). Like Hiroshige’s prints, Miller’s poems are a window through which we view the joyous details of the difficult lives of innkeepers, cooks, porters, wrestlers, and men and women of the pleasure quarter. She freely draws from Hiroshige’s world to illuminate the cultural and moral grounding of the nuclear age.