Overtime: Poems [Paperback]

Joseph Millar (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2001

Joseph Millar's poems come out of the American landscape like runaway diesel trucks loaded with miners, electricians, waitresses, ditch diggers, mechanics, factory workers, the homeless, the hopeless, and the lost. These are the voices poetry has classically ignored, finally speaking to us through Millar's expertly detailed lines. Here is the poetry of work, its dignity, pain, pathos, and oppression rendered in poems so tight they tick like clocks, or bombs. Joseph Millar grew up in Pennsylvania and received an MA degree from Johns Hopkins University. He spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay area, working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines and he has won fellowships from Montalvo Center for the Arts and from Oregon Literary Arts. He now teaches at Mount Hood Community College, in Oregon.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

The twentieth was the century of the poem of personal experience, and there is no reason to think that the twenty-first won't carry the genre forward, ensuring that future chroniclers will find out fairly easily how the late-modern poets lived. Millar shows that they live like lots of other people, though quite differently from each other, in poems alike primarily in their high levels of accomplishment. He writes so musically that ordinary occurrences take on the tones and luster of extraordinary art. A college teacher's son, he got B.A and M.A. degrees but then spent 25 years as a working stiff, especially in commercial fishing and telephone line laying and repair. Paying the bills has always been a problem, and the family he created was fractured by drunkenness and divorce. He can complain, but he is too sympathetic to be any good at blaming. Hauntingly clear vignettes of surveying in wintry Alaska, worriedly accompanying his expansively drunken father in a workers' bar, and wiring a casino at 5 a.m. (the only time the management will allow it) alternate in his work with rueful, charged recollections of single-parenting his 10-year-old son, sometimes not very well, and accounts of good if slightly desperate times with a new girlfriend.The poetry of experience is seldom better than in this books. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Paperback: 88 pages
• Publisher: Eastern Washington University Press (October 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0910055742
• ISBN-13: 978-0910055741
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.7 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #992,176 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

JOSEPH MILLAR's first collection, Overtime (2001) was finalist for the Oregon Book Award. A second collection, Fortune, appeared in 2007. Millar grew up in Pennsylvania, attended Johns Hopkins University and spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay area working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. It would be two decades before he returned to poetry. His poems--stark, clean, unsparing--record the narrative of a life fully lived among fathers, sons, brothers, daughters, weddings and divorces, men and women. His work has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2008 Pushcart Prize and has appeared in such magazines as DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, APR, and Ploughshares. In 1997 he gave up his job as telephone installation foreman to try his hand at teaching. A new chapbook, Bestiary, is now available from Red Dragonfly Press, and a third collection, Blue Rust, will be published by Carnegie-Mellon in fall of 2011. Millar is now core faculty at Pacific University's Low Residency MFA and lives in Raleigh, NC, with his wife, the poet Dorianne Laux.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My Copy Is Worn From Constant Re-Reading, October 3, 2006

By 

R. Peake "cyberscribe" (London, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Overtime: Poems (Paperback)

When I'm not picking this book up again (& again) as a source of inspiration, it rests on my shelf between Phillip Levine's _What_Work_Is_ and B.H. Fairchild's _The_Art_Of_The_Lathe_. It holds its own in that company as a solid, timeless book that both furthers and transcends the genre of poems about work.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Overtime is a hit, January 2, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Overtime: Poems (Paperback)

This book opened my eyes to the secret life of men. Camille Paglia, Philip Levine, Richard Hugo and Larry Levis would love this book. If you've ever worked, raised a child, been married or divorced, had a desperate love affair, drank too much, tried too hard, missed your father or read Keats out loud to the salt marches, this is the book for you. A great accomplishment by a wonderful new poet.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Your bookshelf will thank you!, May 1, 2011

By 

Michael Meyerhofer (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Overtime: Poems (Paperback)

Joseph Millar's Overtime is one of those rare books that combines narrative brevity with lush descriptions, the result being a book that is both accessible and joyfully, smartly lyrical. This can be seen in the opening line of Love Pirates: "I follow with my mouth the small wing of muscle / under your shoulder, lean over your back, breathing / into your hair and thinking of nothing" (49). Another prime example is Ed's Auto Repair, one of my favorites from this book, in which the narrator watches a mechanic's "...torch flame splash / its lizard shapes onto the dark steel" (4). Like all of Millar's poems, Ed's Auto Repair resonates with visceral, luxurious descriptions: a shop "smelling of gas and iron," "air hoses [hissing] in the corners," "the shadows under the muffler, / the new metal ticking."

I first came across Millar's work in various literary journals and was immediately struck by Millar's ability to accomplish some kind of lyrical feat in every line without sounding heavy-handed. I ordered this book and have been recommending it ever since. In short, Overtime is just a lovely example of wordsmithing at its best. Pick it up; your bookshelf will thank you!