My Round Table: Myth-Poems

Brian Burch is a teacher, writer and poet and author of Still Under the
Thumb.

Sparling Mills wrote this collection during a lengthy illness, when, according to the cover notes, her only companions were characters in books, composers, painters, singers, and her husband. Because of these companions, My Round Table often seems more of a series of reviews (albeit more imaginative than most) than a volume of poetry.

Mills’s collection shows her eclectic interests. We are provided with fantasies of Kris Kristofferson and muses over Chopin, a homage to Stone Angel and an exploration of phallic images in the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. These poems reveal a writer who uses simple language and easily grasped images in order to allow the reader to realize that art does indeed mirror our lives. These “reviews” also examine stereotypes and burst pretentions.

Mills’s best poems are ones that seem to be coming directly from her own experiences and not reflected through the work of other artists. “Snow Goose Cottage” and “Margaret Trudeau” provide strong evidence of Mills’s poetic imagination. She plays with language in a way that shows she cares about her reader and her craft.

My Round Table isnice, light reading with some hooks that can be surprisingly painful and a few moments of supreme simplicity that are a joyful experience for the reader.