The Selected Poems of Bermudian poet Nancy Anne Miller traces the decades she has been writing about her homeland, with the use of image metaphor as her primary tool for revealing Bermuda’s complexities. Her choice of this technique is to consciously break apart linear intentional thinking or the masculine sentence as Woolf referenced.
For Miller, the use of image metaphor allows a poem’s meaning to radiate across the entire poem as one thing is reflected through another in a circular movement, hence preventing one final climatic interpretation. She states: “The island’s history cannot be written down in a straight line” – and sees this as a female-voiced way of being a poet, one that is inclusive, layered, and exploratory.
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“These taut, image-dense poems provide (among other things) a kind of time-lapse record of Bermuda’s history, showing how ‘an entire empire hangs in the chintz curtain.’ Everyday life in Bermuda (and beyond) is evoked by a set of tensions – between the culture of taste, class, and propriety and the history of race, caste, and violence; between the sense of prized uniqueness and dulling isolation; between a sense of remoteness from the world and the exemplariness of the island-as-world. Nancy Anne Miller’s photographer’s eye links the silver tea service on the mahogany table to bucolic English village life, bustling American highways, and the sights, smells, and sounds of the Caribbean archipelago.”
Simon Lewis, editor of Illuminations: An International Magazine of Contemporary Writing, and author of White Women Writers and Their African Invention (2013), and British and African Literature in Transnational Context (2011), University Press of Florida
