Book Review: "Paradise and Other Lost Places" by Jim Miller
". . . Miller pours his entire being, everything he loves, everything he has ever wanted, onto the page"
By Alys Masek
Jim Miller’s new collection of poems, Paradise and Other Lost Places is a remarkable achievement. Miller writes with tenderness and generosity about the devastation wrought by the 2023 Lahaina fire, the travails of the post-industrial Midwest, the lost souls who haunt his hometown of San Diego and his own near brush with death. All of this is accomplished in gorgeous, precise language with not a syllable wasted. Miller’s great gift as a poet is to simultaneously immerse himself in the moment, to feel with exquisite empathy the challenges and heartbreak of the workers, dreamers, and dispossessed he writes about while always remaining an observer, a witness who refuses to avert his eyes from hard truths.
Paradise and Other Lost Places begins with Maui both before and after the 2023 fire. In “After the Fire”, Miller writes about the Jodo Mission destroyed in the Lahaina fire. He details the Mission’s history which was built by Japanese immigrants who came to work in the pineapple fields in the early 1900’s. Miller describes the only part of the Mission that did not burn to the ground: the 12-foot Amida Buddha. Miller writes: “Now, the Buddha sits in lonely vigil / amidst the desolation / on Puunoa point, / in sight of Lanai and Moloka’i / inviting your gaze to the distant horizon.” This image of the Buddha presiding over a scorched landscape perfectly embodies the desolation of that fire, the painstaking work of many lifetimes destroyed in just a few hours. However, Miller also offers a moment of grace and hope: “Never forget the transient nature of all things, / the Buddha’s solitary witness reminds us, / But also know that / we are always becoming, / like the newly formed shoots / on the scorched banyan tree / down the road.”
Another of the Maui poems finds Miller walking to the beach and almost stumbling on a green sea turtle “sleeping like a drunk / with his head flopped out in front of him, / and his flippers splayed by his sides as / the water slowly rippled up to kiss him. / When he heard us / he opened one eye, lazily, / so we stepped back several feet, / quietly, / savoring our good fortune, / grateful for this gift / of amazement / at first light.” However, as much Miller might have wanted to remain in that moment of delight, he cannot forget that the world is burning: “Later that evening / I saw it on the news on TV / New York City was choking on smoke / from burning forests in Canada. / The world is burning faster and more furiously / than even our love can repair.”
In the book’s second section, Miller writes about the intimate joys of his life – a life nearly ended by the sudden onset of an autoimmune disorder. In “Last Summer in the Sierras”, he recounts the bittersweet joy of hiking with his soon-to-be adult son. This poem beautifully captures the relationship between the two: “That night at camp, / we ate beans from a tin can / and sat together, / chatting and staring up / at the endless, star-filled sky / that always makes you feel / small and vast / at the same time.”
Later, the quiet joy Miller experiences as a husband and father gives way to a searing exploration of his close encounter with death. The death poems (for lack of a better description) are clearly informed by Miller’s lifelong Buddhist practice. He inhabits both the existential terror of near-death and the Buddhist practice of being and observing. In “What Was It Like?”, he explores, in stunning images, what it felt like to come so close to death: “It was like falling out /of the world, / away from the vast horizons / and the loving embrace / of crowds of beautiful strangers– / the books of their lives / written on their faces”. And what was it to live again: “it was the smell of my son’s hair / as he bent over me, the taste of the thick / salt of tears”.
The book’s third and final section is the most-wide ranging, with poems on everything from Tijuana at night to the walking wounded haunting San Diego’s downtown, to Miller’s own father. In the opening poem, “The Wild Years,” Miller follows a friend into Tijuana’s Zona Norte in the early hours of the morning. The poem perfectly captures the wildness that belongs mostly to the young. But it also interrogates what motivates that recklessness. The poem does not explicitly say it, but there is clearly a woundedness fueling this long night.
In “Work”, Miller sums up the central reality of living with an alcoholic parent: “Having run out / of lies, / my father fights / the cool gray morning”. Substance abuse is, at its heart, a disease of deception and to be the child of an alcoholic is to be subjected to a constant stream of lies, half-truths and gas lighting. Later in that same poem, Miller articulates the endless yearning of a child to heal the brokenness of an alcoholic parent: “Father, if I could, / I’d take the sneer off / the face of the world, / bring back the lush green / fields of your childhood, / make the work simple and good.”
The book ends with a tour de force of a poem, “This Much I know About Desire.” In this poem, Miller pours his entire being, everything he loves, everything he has ever wanted, onto the page. As I finished this generous and open-hearted work of a lifetime, I could not help but think that the true secret of Miller’s survival is right here in this poem: his deep love for the world in all its damaged glory and his deeper love for all the imperfect, seeking and striving people in it.
Alys Masek lives in Carlsbad California with her husband and two daughters. She is a public interest attorney. Her poetry has previously appeared in The Noe Valley Review, City Works Journal, Hunger and Thirst: Food Literature and Knocking at the Door: Poems about Approaching the Other. She is also the editor with Kelly Mayhew of Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting on San Diego City Works Press.