Poetry Book Club: Paper Banners by Jane Miller

Each month, the Poetry Book Club meets online to discuss one must-read book of poems, whether a timeless classic or an award-winning contemporary. Led by Napa poet Kathleen Patterson, who has been an enthusiastic book club member since its beginning, meetings are open to all levels of poetry readers, both the curious and the committed.

A herald of desire, mortality, and the mission of poetry itself, Jane Miller's Paper Banners catalogs the intimate experiences that create a life, hoping that "what will survive of us is love."

A herald of desire, suffering, mortality, and the mission of poetry itself, Jane Miller's Paper Banners "say the cosmos/ isn't hostile/ yet strangles a dove /with one hand." Against this angst, Miller steps outside of history to contemplate voices of love, aging, and artmaking. Many poems are addressed to family members, friends, and young poets, or pay homage to familiar figures taken by time or tragedy, including Virginia Woolf, Osip Mandelstam, and the Song Dynasty poet Li Qingzhao. In clear, short lines, these poems harken to ancient banderoles, or pennants, which announced rallying cries on the lances of knights and mottoes on the flags of ships. Here, Miller's Paper Banners are made of images of the American Southwest and scrutinize its political and physical landscape. Like skywriting streamed in white smoke, this collection bears its message on the wind, its words addressed to anyone. As Miller catalogs the intimate experiences that make up a life-friendships, loves, dreams, our human connection to the environment--Paper Banners becomes a hope that "what will survive of us is love."

Jane Miller has written twelve books, most recently Paper Banners, Who Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions, and Working Time: Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Travel. For over thirty years, she has performed her creative work and lectured on literature and the fine arts at universities, colleges, libraries, community centers, and public arts venues. The recipient of a Wallace Award, she has also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Western States Book Award, and the Audre Lorde Award. Miller served as a professor for many years in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona--including a stint as its director--and as a visiting poet at the University of Texas Michener Center for Writers in Austin.

Event Venue

Online