Customer Reviews

Where Are the Love Poems for Dictators ?

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In my review of Ethelbert Miller's book, "How We Sleep on the Nights We Don't Make Love," I observed that his poetry sometimes misses the mark, "particularly when he has a 'political point' in mind." And, as you can guess from the title, Mr Miller certainly has a "political point" to make - in deed, several points - in many of the poems included in "Where are the Love Poems for Dictators?" To make matters worse, Mr Miller, who is at his best when he is exploring the simple emotions of everyday life, attempts in "Dictators" to speak in the voice of a South American indian or peasant. It simply doesn't work, (by the way, I'm not one of those people who thinks that the only person who can write convincingly about the life of a Turkish astronaut is a Turkish astronaut - some people can shift their shape to become someone or something else, and some people can't - Mr Miller can't). Mr Miller can write wonderful poems - poems that illuminate the humanity of everyday life in a very special way. Unfortunately, there are few, if any, of those poems in "Dictators."