Destiny's Calendar

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

Metras’s long introductory poem, “Burning Instead of Beauty,” is a powerful piece, not always possible to follow. There is a great difference between ambiguity and vagueness in poetry and the leaps between stanzas in this poem are often merely vague.

All of the poems (mostly on domestic themes — children, first pregnancy, grandmother) are energetic, and it is very refreshing to see a man writing on home, love, and family and doing it with great tenderness.

One of the most striking poems (except for a weak ending) is “The Book of Smiles”:

This is the second poem in a series of 18 poems on Martha, who lived to be 102 — the last 98 years in an institution. Metras’s energetic metrics and marvelous lines like “whenever the book of Martha opened / inside them,” make the poems work even if they do sometimes seem to go on and on.