The Authentic Lie

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

This collection of poems is divided into three titled sections: “Discourse with the Dead,” “The Assassins,” and “The Authentic Lie.” The 28 poems (or poem-lets) in the first section are not separately titled, but the eleven in the second section and the eight in the third section are.

These odd little things — some prose poems, some little paragraphs, some sentences — are puzzling. Here and there they arrest the attention:

After your death we grew up

more or less. Life — is miscellaneous,

but nonetheless dazzling. There’s rust

on the surface. I mention it briefly.

Namjoshi plays around — sometimes interestingly, sometimes not: “Your father had a father ... / That improves nothing, makes matters worse.”

There is an attempt to tie these poems together: “But if the sun were mortal, then what would happen?” These lines follow a poem ending: “... The Sun / is made of metal and can’t be killed.”

There are some nice little lyrics. “Little” is a key word; these little-lets sometimes charm, more often bore and puzzle:

To die free and easy, to insure

with surcease a kind of success, a smiling

release ... The piety of daughters

is hard to endure.

Prose poems can be so striking. These are not. They are not poorly done exactly, but some, such as the untitled poem on page 53, strike me as silly and mannered:

Lady Flora, a woman of exceeding and excessive sensibility, explained to me once that she would rather commit suicide than commit murder. I nodded sagely. “But that was elementary,” she said. “I would rather be killed than kill myself.” I pondered the point. ‘If she would rather be killed,’ I thought, ‘then what about me? What was expected?’ “Have you,” I asked politely, “given much thought to the manner of your death?” “Oh yes,” she answered, “I would genuinely prefer a well-executed death to a bungled attempt.” I stared at my hands. They looked very like the hands of an amateurish strangler. What was I to say? “Let us practice,” I said.

Nevertheless, there are a few wonderful touches, and Namjoshi is a poet to take seriously.