Streets Too Narrow for Parades

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

The 61 poems in this collection are grouped under four headings: “Homework,” “Downtown,” “Imaginary Suburbs of a Real City,” and “Troubled Music.” “Autumn Story,” from the first group, is fairly typical of this poet’s technique:

There is a childlike simplicity in this and in most of the poems: they are moderately charming, pleasant enough to the ear, easy on the mind.

The poems are not startlingly new or vivid, but they all have a kind of simple sincerity — the good kind of sincerity, not the wet-eyed, overly earnest type characteristic of poets who take themselves and their work too seriously.

The title line, “streets too narrow for parades,” is repeated in many poems. It would seem to suggest some impoverishment of the festive spirit, but it isn’t always employed to mean that. In “Contestants,” one of the better poems, the title line and another motif, “slow learners,” come together to say something about big fish in little ponds, but in the title poem, the line seems to be saying something about the timidity of scholars.

Despite the simple vocabulary and syntax, the poems are not always easy to understand. What, for example, does the speaker mean in the final stanza of the final poem, “The Newcomer”?

Is the speaker a very bright person who feels isolated from others? She says in the first stanza of this poem that she wanted to do “every good thing, / For slow learners.” A paraphrase of this poem would sound sentimental and simpleminded, but here, as elsewhere, the poet’s unpretentious language and syntax redeem heavy-handed themes.