Caminante is a sublime adventure, a devious path, a jokester, reverently irreverent, and haunted by the briny mer that grinds "granite into sand".

 

The book moves from bidding the traveler heed that the trip makes the road (rather than the road making the trip) and then a spooky piece about the doomed, frozen 1845 voyage of the Terror and Erebus (in search of the Northwest Passage) --- to the maturation of a bat and its virgin voyage from her mother's warm care.

 

From seemingly effortless sketches about almost tangible seafolk (playthings of the capricious Davy Jones' Locker's whims, all) to the sky-obscuring drear of No. 18 Taylor Street, Milner flexes his subjective dexterity.  The reader may learn that nothing is to be surprising if mentioned; times and places and situations are all happening NOW, ghosts and the quick co-exist in a poetic jubilee or funeral shuffle.

 

Loot-stealin' Prometheus, musin' about reincarnated Euripides and Joan of Arc, slight references to Mayan blood ritual, conquistadors, and a brief glimpse of abandoned Alicia of Jocotepec, mating elephant seals, dinosaur blood in the soil, an Egyptian tomb, etc.

 

 

I dig how the wind of the book always brings us back to sea-sprayed sails and the outliving presence of indifferent water (probably owing to Milner's off-land background). I love the out-of-the-blue images sprouted sometimes seemingly for "don't-think-of-a-pink-elephant"'s sake: an evocative trick on the mind's eye: "heart in marble", "smile like a dipping gull", "the blind guitarist", "sleeping hips", "jig-sawn streets", "an hour-long kiss", "a drunken shepherd on a spree", "smelled of murder and pulpits", etc.

 

I'm both a fan and an indulger in rich imagery and verbized nouns and nounized verbs and adjectived adverbs and adverbial adjectives. Language is like a Rubik's Cube with millions of combinations. Poets who aren't shy of sensuality and mixed/mangled/shattered/glued-together metaphors and such are to be saluted.

 

My fondest piece is "Ice Flow" (the piece about the doomed 1845 Arctic voyage previously mentioned).  The odd narrator is one of the crew whose corpse is disinterred and studied and restored to his resting place, recalling his fellows and the ordeal, complaining about "the awfulness of life" and relieved as the modern folks return him to his coffin and shut the lid.  This is a second death, in a sense.  Reluctant to compare, I am slightly reminded of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology. The somewhat eerie yet liberating tone of that piece seems to drift through the book.  A clip:

 

"Another phantom of a dream stands out.

I heard a knocking on the door, rasp

of a jemmy on the coffin lid; a flood

of light that burst my head, a voice

 

that blew my temples wide, more voices

and a tapping on my chest.  As if dropped

out of a womb I felt a stirring..."

 

A warning: this is a work demanding some work.  Though nimble and far from plodding, Milner's usual pieces can't be taken like Asprin.  One must take time to indulge.  As one who is easily repelled by drawn-out, long-winded poetry, I can testify to Caminante's exception.  This is due to clever story-telling, rather than undirected poetizing. 

 

Caminante is a work to be reread, of course. And it's game for occasional dips and tastes and sharing one or two pieces with a friend from time to time. In other words, the book isn't a singular experience. It's mica-layered and delightful and disturbing.

 

Milner Place lives in Huddersfield, England.  His 7th poetry collection, Caminante, is his most recent work - released by Wrecking Ball Press (www.wreckingballpress.com).  He has also written The City of Flowers, Piltdown Man and Batwoman, In A Rare Time of Rain, etc.