Commentary by Jennifer Maiden (Australian Poet and Literary Critic)
on Morning Glory: Radiant Night

The diction is absolutely marvellous, particularly in its conceptual use and in its aural qualities. It is also beautiful. All the words relate extremely well in an intellectual way. At all times, the language is very powerful and yet handled very delicately.

There is excellent maintenance of energy, an enormous 'drive' through the concept and the use of language; an unfaltering sense of direction and control. No lapses, no sags.

The main theme (and particularly the selection of mushroom imagery) is an extremely risky one, but it has been pulled off successfully. By tackling this theme, it would be very easy to produce just another pacifist poem, but this one retains its freshness and originality chiefly by the way in which it refers to the mushroom's primaeval origins. Use of the drug concept and imagery, together with use of emphasis on 'the two lights' by the subtitle, help to offset the cliched mushroom-imagery and achieve the very delicate balance which makes this poem so successful.

Although, being so complex and difficult, the poem has necessitated long and hard work, it yet retains its life, freshness and vigour. The poem is very big, and the theme an enormously difficult one to attempt. It has been accomplished magnificently.

Commentary by Luis Sebastian Stuart Pennington
(scholar, translator and linguist, Buenos Aires)

Although The Tiger in the Head is a small book, its content is vast. I enjoyed reading again and again and examining the highly elaborated poems. They are very refined and complex in several aspects.

Reading these books was just like — pardon my commonplace comparison — walking a path that leads to different sceneries and landscapes. You watch each landscape slowly and carefully and then walk on to see the next. But you stop midway and return to the place you've just left behind as you feel you did not see it in its entirety. So you return to the previous place and there you find new details that had escaped notice before. Like a kind of Heraclitus' river, poems change with every new reading. And I found that fascinating: new alliterations, assonances, musicality of phrase, rhetoric figures, overlapped multiplicity of interpretations arise every time.

In this journey of changing sceneries, I felt that elements of English literature abounded in the texts. Some compound words seemed to come from the Anglo Saxon period or from the Icelandic sagas, some images and musicality of phrase were like those by H. Dolittle, the punctuation reminded me of e.e.cummings, the hexagram from the I-Ching, and many many others. Poems seemed to echo all the literature in one line.

Polysemy (many meanings in one)
The resonance of the semantic spectrum of words was also very interesting. The polysemy of words are connected in several ways so you never simply read a single line but also the numerous semantic overtones it has. I had to look up some words in the dictionary as there were many words whose meaning I didn't know. But when I read all the possible meanings for one word, I noticed that all these meanings could be applied simultaneously in the interpretation of that word, amplifying the idea rather than delimiting the meaning. The result is a nice paradox: sometimes expression can reach a higher level of accuracy and effectiveness with polysemy than with linear concepts.

I think this is why it is so difficult to minimize these poems to a simple summary. On the contrary, one can not reduce them or even simplify them. I do not doubt that this is because of the resonance of semantic spectra of words and metaphors.

Images
I also found some images that had a strong presence in the poems, like those connected with the head or the space of thoughts, for instance. It was interesting to notice that these metaphors connected to the head were at the beginning of the poems, except on one occasion: clatter of the cryptal head, chaparral of his skull, saharas of his skull, savannas of his skull, strictures of the skull, day slides whistling into the head, detours through the brain, cerebral bypass [from Visionary at Dawn, Aubade, The Painting Makes a Traffic Signal].

Another image I found was that of a language-made body: this is noticeable in The Holy Bard, The Windy Scribbler, The Proof, Through Our Vocal Intercourse, etc. Of the assertion that language and body are intimately interwined, I can not have any doubt at all. Reminds me of that adage from the psychoanalitic area: symptoms are words trapped in the body.

Another image that I liked was that of light in the hair, on the head. This bright image is found in lines of different poems. [from Child in Nature: "All adrift/ in the eddying air,/ she wore the sun/ like straws in her hair.] This image reminded me of the idea of sanctity, intelligence, purity or charm.

Figures of speech
The figures of speech are really beautiful. I particularly liked "sing soft", "in darkness drapes of silence", "craven light eclipsed my silences", "to the immaculate singing of steel", "my blood is coloured loudly", "space resounds in silence", "in bright pain". I also liked the phrase "living clay", the comparison: "patient as trees", the rhythm in the phrase "a clone, a ghost, a wraith, a waif, a smear..." and the alliterations: "the pull of the lover is like the light", "the flower enfolded flowers".

Musicality
I must admit that I was impressed by the musicality of the phrases with which poems are formed. Sometimes I read the lines aloud to hear how they sound and enjoy the succession of sounds.

The sweetness achieved in Child in Nature and You Have Been Here Before is incredible, the character of plenitude and strength in The Christmas Arrival of the Animals is great. As for this poem, it ends with a beautiful phrase that says: "...on the christmas of our beasts" (phrase which I loved!) which reminded me of a prehistoric Steatopigyiac Venus whose name was "Our Lady of the Mammoths" (it sounds so nice to me!).

The peremptory final sentence "I swear his mortal dust shall quake in mine" is also glorious, almost Shakespearean!

This musicality of words is also accompanied with the musicality of images, like precisely that of "Bach" which is outright lovely. I also find this musical energy in Through our Vocal Intercourse. This scorrevole of words that swirls is almost unfaultingly present in every poem. No wonder Muir-Miller is writing for music. This flowing stream of beautiful, splendid, striking words reminds me very much of Aimé Césaire and his Armes Miraculeuses. Another author that came to my mind was H.D. Thoreau while I read The Bird, as I found it very similar to H.D. Thoreau's Smoke.

Highly musical, the poems oscillate between torment and relief, relief and torment. The climaxes stemming from this are very well built.

Metaphors and Spirituality
A string of metaphors revolves around the old biblical scenes: the Lamb, Paradise, Adam, the Immaculate Conception, Crucifixion; others include scavenging, crisis and angst. These strings of metaphors resonate to one another like tuning forks. And if I am allowed to continue using this comparison, I would dare say that this resonance also creates harmonics like I/the eye (agate-eye, eyes, slack-orbs, eyeless) you/the ewe.

The crow seems to be one of the central metaphors: a bird not unfrequently found in cosmogonies or mythologies, sometimes as the messenger between the quick and the dead, between inside the arc and outside, sometimes as the creator of light.

As a scavenger bird, the crow is frequently connected to the eyes and that resonates with the eagles that soar in the eyes. In Spanish, there is a saying: "Breed crows and they will pluck your eyes out" as a warning to mothers whose children are very spoiled. The crow also vibrates with the mad birdmen, the day's hot breath that hovers, the plover-birds (= birds of rain, from Latin pluvia) and the galah and these with the crow. Then you can find resonances of the earth, of the sheep, of pain, among others.

It is remarkable how so much can be contained in few pages, full of wonders and profusely elaborated poems. I sincerely wish more people had access to these precious books.

Commentary by Robinson McClellan
(composer, music scholar, and teacher, New York City)

I am struck by what I experience as the intensely affective and insightful impact of Robin Muir-Miller's work. These poems are not there simply to be read and enjoyed casually; they demand to be taken in deeply and heard for the urgent messages they express so unflinchingly. This poetry needs the commitment of one's full intellect and heart.

I'm consistently impressed by two other things in particular about these poems. First, they are deeply metaphorical, and cannot be read literally. The reader who attempts to understand them at face value will miss the point.

Second, the strongly musical sense and knowledge in these poems is arresting. Setting her words to music has been an experience noticeably distinct from the other poetry I have set: there is a feeling that a third layer of perception and cognition, beyond both the words or the pitches and rhythms I choose for them, is hovering in the background needing to be addressed and accounted for. It makes the experience of setting the words both more challenging, and for that all the more rewarding. I'm not surprised that so many composers have set her work.

I love the way Muir-Miller uses the sounds of the English language to the fullest advantage, in partnership with their meanings of course, to create tightly packed, multi-layered fabrics of meaning. That kind of many-layered art reminds me of a medieval sensibility where every tiny detail counts, yet the overall flow, the point, is not lost in the details.

One of the things that makes her poetry unique is the presence, in many poems, of what one might call a 'parallel sound world' — a system of assonances and progressions from one consonant or vowel sound (or combination thereof) to another related one, or the careful placement in certain places of a particular sound that mirrors, reflects, or comments on the semantic meaning of the words. The reader, aware or not, is being told things by the sounds themselves, which add an entire layer with its own shape, momentum, and nuance. Perhaps an apt comparison is the leitmotifs in a Wagner opera, telling us things the characters themselves have not stated, and may be only dimly aware of if at all.

I'd like to comment in particular on one poem, Morning Glory: Radiant Night, which I set as the core part of my cantata This Ravelled Dust. In working closely with the text, I came to know the incredible intricacy of the sounds, and the finesse with which Muir-Miller transforms the sound world from one stanza to the next. While one would not want to attempt such an analysis for every poem — if only for fear of ruining their magic, like explaining a joke — my insight into this poem took time and hard work, and many returns to the material to find new treasures. So my hope is that a brief 'guided tour' to one poem might help open the reader's eyes to the riches in all the others.

Let's begin with a simple example in the first stanza:

1
Glory's lavished
over the shale -
a gauzed and
shimmering hush.
The mantra
moulds its singers,
mosses chime in the
chiselled dust.

First, notice the prominent "g" and "m" sounds in this stanza. There is a shared "g"-to-"z" progression in "Glory's" and "gauzed". Meanwhile, the vowels following the three "m" words make a nice back-and-forth: "mantra, moulds, mosses" — and the sense of return to an "ah" sound on "mosses" is pronounced in a subtly different way than its counterpart in "mantra". If this were a study of musical form, we might designate those three vowels, linked by their preceding "m", as Part 1, Part 2, and a return to Part 1, but the latter with a slight variation.

That's only the beginning. The consonant "sh" dominates the first four lines, reflecting the softness of the scene depicted: perhaps a starry glow surrounds this garden we are entering: lavished, shale, shimmering, hush. But soon — too soon, just as we had begun to relax and enjoy this wonderful garden — that cushioning welcome hardens, just a little, as "sh" becomes "ch": chime, chiselled. We are thus warned.

By the end of the stanza, "ch" has become "st." While "sh" and "ch" are obviously related sounds, it might seem a stretch to connect "st" with them. But we soon learn their relationship with that sound, and its importance as it unfolds further in the next stanza:

2
Adam the dust
sifts quickening wind
through his shadowy sighs;
lustre infuses his rising
with tendrils of melody,
missel and brier.

We now realize that all the lushness of the garden was preparing us for its grief-stricken occupant, Adam, and his defining nature as duST. Notice another intricacy: in music, composers are always seeking to vary their ideas in small ways to create new interest, and one of those ways is to reverse the order of two notes. If consonants are notes, Muir-Miller has brought this technique to poetry. Connecting stanzas 1 and 2, notice the progression of these four words: its, dust, sifts, lustre. The t and the s switch places with each other, and this is no accident: Muir-Miller has skillfully choreographed her words to create an important (if subliminal) back-and-forth effect — which, vitally, parallels and reinforces the meaning of the text and its sense of foreboding.

Now we find yet more interrelationships between "sh" and "s". Recall the very first line and the word "lavished": the "-shed", with its hard "d", sounds more like "sht" — a softer version of what it then becomes: "st". So given the reversal we discovered between "st" and "ts", one might expect something similar with "sht". And Muir-Miller delivers: those two sounds appear in reverse "gauzed and shimmering" (the "and" between them notwithstanding). But of course we only realize this relationship between "lavished" and "gauzed and shimmering" after the fact, when it has been revealed by the more obvious "st" to "ts".

Notice too that the second stanza has only one "sh": the harder, more ominous "s" has now taken over: dust, sifts, sighs, lustre, missel. And the astute reader will have noticed another close relative to the consonant "s" lurking thoughout both stanzas: "z". Glory's, gauzed, moulds, chiselled, infuses, rising, tendrils — to name only those with the most impact.

Let's leave the "s" sound for now, and its transformations. In the next stanza, two new characters come to the fore, even more ominous than before: "r" and "v":

3
Rapturous singing
ravels the roots
of a cloven thorn.
Viper-tides
slide writhily,
slaking his aspirations.

These two sounds are almost entirely absent from the first two stanzas, but now they make their presence felt forcefully: Rapturous, ravels, roots, cloven, Viper-tides.

Muir-Miller also now makes explicit the importance of a vowel sound that has been lurking, but which we have not had to acknowledge until now: "i". The fourth and fifth lines of this stanza are dripping with it. If we count this sound (pronounced "eye") alongside its close relative (in English, at least) "ih" as in "its", then we suddenly notice its presence in the first two stanzas as well (I'll leave it to the reader to review them with this in mind). And as the serpent enters the scene, that "eye/ih" sound frighteningly links the third stanza with the first lines of the next:

4
Hissing its wisdom and
sloughing its wiles,
the malus wood exhales.
A raunchy, luring aroma
invades the Arcadian glade
like an alien fungus.

Now we must come to terms with perhaps the most important, and most ominous vowel in the whole poem: "a". Notice the final line of stanza 3: "slaking his aspirations". Those two "a" sounds are taken up in stanza 4 with a vengeance: malus, exhales, raunchy, aroma, invades, arcadian, glade, alien. The sharp "aye" version of the vowel is especially prominent. In the next stanza, this sound continues to gather force and momentum:

5
Its spores sufflate
and gust awry:
it looms into
a lusting,
gruff miasma.
Lyrics and garlands mutate.

A slight change of scene follows, as we witness the garden's reaction. In its "berating" it recalls its erstwhile glory ("gl" becomes "gr", and "sh") but also echoes or mimicks the aggression against it with those "a" sounds. In like fashion, the "shivering gravel" of Adam echoes the Garden's distress.

6
The garden's pristine
bliss, berating,
soughs bitterly
over its
shivering gravel.

It should not be difficult to trace the destructive path of the vowel "a" through the remaining stanzas, in all its versions ("ah", "a" as in cat, and especially "aye"), as the "accolade of mushrooms" becomes "arson-blossoms" and we are left with "irradiant" desolation.

7
This scattered dust hones
acid-tunes, pricks spore into
its drains and bones.
Strains of a murmuring
fungus explode into
garish, babbling moonblooms.

8
A
booming
accolade
of mushrooms
plunders across
the planet's
arable
brow.....

9
In a crimson country garden,
gashed by a ravishing flashback,
arson-blossoms rasp and hollow
the evening's hallowed aurora.
Dust and vespers conflagrate:
muting, charred, irradiant.

Most important of all, we are finally told that the true source of this "a" sound, the very seed of the destruction of the Garden, lies in the heart of its grief-stricken occupant, Adam.

10
Adam has grafted
onto the earth
grief.... and a mushroom.

Of course there is much else going on. To name just one more prominent use of consonant transformation, notice how the softer "bl" of "bliss" (stanza 6) and "moonblooms" (stanza 7) becomes its harder counterpart "pl" in "plunders" and "planets" (stanza 8). Like the subtle change from "sh" to "ch" that we witnessed earlier, this shift serves as a sign that things have become more serious, and more ominous.

Rather than spelling out every remaining intricacy in the poem, I'll leave you with a list of things to look for. I urge you to trace these important sounds that give this poem its shape and power, reflecting and commenting, through sound alone, on the story this poem is telling:

A, Aye, Ah, & Aw

G—>GR—>GL, L

D SH—>CH M ST—>TS

Ih & I (“eye”)

M —> B—BL/PL F

Uh—>O—>OO
Uh—> Eh—>Er—>IE

R & V

Finally, it is important to state that these intricacies are not merely games the poet is playing for their own sake; the sound-world she builds, and its development, directly support the poem's semantic meaning and its emotional effect. Explore your own associations and emotional reactions to each of those sounds, and then trace how she uses them in this poem.

And of course, as stated earlier, this is just one poem: I encourage you to go and find equal riches throughout Robin Muir-Miller's work.