Mark Miller, Scanning the Horizon. Port Adelaide: Ginninderra Press, 2018. ISBN: 9781760416379
Yvonne Adami
Mark Miller was born in Warren in western New South Wales. He attended school in Orange before graduating with an Honours degree in English Literature at the University of New England in Armidale. His first book of poems, Conversing With Stones, won the Fellowship of Australian Writers Anne Elder Award in 1989 and his second, This Winter Beach, was published in 1999. Scanning the Horizon is Mark’s third collection, featuring many poems which have won national awards, including the Henry Lawson Open Poetry Prize (2015, 2018), the Rolf Boldrewood Open Poetry Prize (2008, 2016), the Queensland Fellowship of Australian Writers Poetry Prize (2008, 2015) and the Vera Newsom Poetry Prize (2009).
Scanning the Horizon is written in two parts: ‘Approachings’ and ‘Scanning the Horizon’. Its cover features The Road to Berry by the Australian landscape painter Lloyd Frederic Rees (17 March 1895 – 2 December 1988). Berry is a town on the south coast of New South Wales. Most of Rees’s works are preoccupied with depicting the effects of light and emphasis is placed on the harmony between humans and nature. Rees’s painting complements Miller’s themes of place and identity.
Miller’s poem ‘Scanning the Horizon’ references Rees’s painting:
I drive the back road
from Shoalhaven Heads to Berry,
winding past Seven Mile Winery,
the bronze-yellow scarring
the ocean’s line of horizon,
The collection opens with the poem ‘This Estuary’. It invites us on a journey of exploration and discovery; of rivers, seas, drought and fire.
This morning the mist
comes apart before me,
like fabric; like ashes –
Scanning the Horizon includes a number of haiku. The final poem in the collection: ‘Haiku Sequence: In the Zen Garden’ demonstrates the transience of life:
In the Zen Garden
this falling cherry petal
this moment passing
Miller’s subject matter and inspiration are steeped in landscape; its moods and elements, the rhythms of the seasons and weather. In ‘Haven’ he writes the landscape as sanctuary and retreat:
Five o’clock
on this pewter morning
I take the winding track
And
here, nothing else matters
but the sound
of my own breathing
Written with detail and spare, precise imagery, poems in Scanning the Horizon are acute observations of the natural world, especially the Shoalhaven district of the south coast of New South Wales. They are also of loss and ageing, celebrations of family and of human interaction with nature. In ‘Returning Home’, a worker walks the familiar path home;
I am coming home
to the shrill call of birds
skittering in smudges of dull brush;
The poem Somewhere in Central Australia, recalls the Australian Government allowing British scientists to explode atomic bombs in the central Australian desert near Maralinga between 1952–1956. A Royal Commission thirty years later found that safety standards for Aboriginal peoples there had been inadequate.
Rattling,
shaking through dust
in the old truck-
in the back
with empty petrol barrels
two Aborigines
a young mother
and her daughter
crying
scratching the red
welts of her skin.
The collection includes poems based on personal memory, of parents, childhood and a tribute to the Australian poet Dorothy Hewett 1923 – 2002. Miller’s poem ‘The Return’ (after Dorothy Hewett) is a reflection of her poem ‘Summer’. Both poems trace early family life; daily comings and goings. It is poetry of meditation of the living world and of connection to the earth.
I will walk up the moonlit path
between the peppermint bushes
to the little weatherboard house
with the rusty windows facing the bay (Hewett)
I’ll walk through the open door
without knocking,
there’ll be two boys in shorts
lying on the lounge room floor,
listening to the radio (Miller)
These poems are narrative journeys; reminiscing on place and time. Mark Miller is a poet of the geographic and spiritual landscape.
Yvonne Adami’s poetry chapbook, TIDAL, was published by the Melbourne Poets Union in 2017. She assists in the organisation of literary events, workshops, readings and author talks in her local community.
