An extraordinary new voice singing with clarity and grace.' Radiant utterance that speaks of island experiences and gender politics from a deep well of understanding, with empathy, humour and insight. There are surprises, there is beauty, there are pleasures to be discovered, there is much to be enjoyed.'īernardine Evaristo 'Some of the most exciting poetry I've read in years. Independent on Sunday 'These captivating poets write from the heart with poems which range from the spare and haunting to the risky and experimental. 'A tremendous range of writing as excellent Jamaican poets rub shoulders with peers from Haiti, Trinidad and the Bahamas. To read In Nearby Bushes is to be guided into thinking through things, however uncomfortable or uncanny.' 'Miller surpasses expectations for a book to be about something, as if a book's purpose were merely to convey information, or to create an experience. 'This grab-you-by-the-collar collection uses the undergrowth as a symbol for Jamaica's dark side.'
'In Kei Miller's case, perceptions of Jamaica play out wittily through dialect and toponym, and are set against violent circumstances, explored with a profound awareness of their cultural and historical causes.' This method of directing us to what we really need to pay attention to, and where it is happening, is at the core of Miller's latest collection' 'Kei Miller has always had a distinct relationship to ideas of place, able - as the best cartographers are - to make sense of territory new or previously overlooked, and point us to why we should be looking there, and what we should be looking for: the stories that are being buried, being forgotten. the book of poems as a site of potential'ĭominic Leonard, Times Literary Supplement Miller combines reportage, poetry, essay, psalmistry and erasure to show. 'Miller's formal and linguistic inventiveness are at their best in his lively analysis of patois and etymology. What are - what could be - beautiful refuges don't exist, and are the real nowhere places.' It's also a sharp reminder that crisis - endings - will find us, wherever we are. 'Miller deftly uses caesuras,line breaks and antimetabole to keep the reader pivoting between meanings, between growth and rot.' This collection is a powerful testament to his acuity as both poet and critic.'
Joseph Fritsch, Public Books 'Miller's lush, contemplative poetic style is on full display, as is formal innovation with a boundary-breaking structure setting critical 'micro-essays' in conversation with verse. The frequency with which these poems deploy the signifier bush but nevertheless find ways to reimagine its social, political, and aesthetic potentials suggests that we may no sooner exhaust our compulsion for clarity than our desire for obscurity.'
Roger Cox, The Scotsman 'Lyrical contemplation brings to the fore the Jamaican landscape in which the collection is set and its inextricable relationship to racialized violence. Peter Riley, Fortnightly Review Praise for Kei Miller This is a book that offers a wise, colourful and unflinching look at contemporary Jamaica - good and bad - and anyone who loves language will find it utterly intoxicating.' 'The verse movement here, the interplay of sound values in inner rhyme and consonantal pairing, in fact the whole lyrical movement of the text, I find exemplary.'