Landslides: Selected Poems, 1975-1985

Mary Ellen Miller was a poet and Associate Professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green.

This fine collection of evenly and expertly crafted poems is divided into four sections entitled “Dark Fields,” “Sometimes All Over,” “Anniversaries,” and “The Prinzhorn Collection.”

A short poem in section three called “And There Are Certain Enormous Commonplaces” is not intended as the thematic poem of the collection, but its first two lines are a neat summary of precisely what Coles accomplishes in his poems:

And there are certain enormous commonplaces

I cannot elucidate

Elucidating enormous commonplaces — family relationships, a child’s view of the world, madness — is what Coles does especially well.

But there are other themes. One of the lovelier poems from section one has the theme of momentary light:

_______ ran ahead over the fields

They are empty of me now,

they are only fields, or words,

Though the light ran over them

Anxious and swift as childhood.

“Divorced Child” from section two seems almost flat and expository at first reading; but, as with other almost ostentatiously unadorned poems, it goes somewhere in its quiet, little way. Coles, in fact, is painstakingly understated in technique and in sentiment:

but not by any stretch

of the emotions

to be characterized by a word like grief.

“The Prinzhorn Collection”, section four, has a note that tells us these poems are “drawn from a collection of letters, journals, and drawings made by inmates of a mental institution near Munich during the late nineteenth century, and preserved by Dr. Hans Prinzhorn.” The poems are arresting, full of all kinds of horrors of the mind; but they also are quiet, reflective, qualifying, as if the poet is afraid to say too much, to overstate, when the situation itself is so poignant.