Because There Was No Sea

Because There Was No Sea combines a mastery of simile (the 'jaws' of bicycle brakes snapping at the wind 'like two dogs'; a golf ball hit 'like a semibreve into/ the staff of phone lines') with a Blake-like ability to build whole worlds from a grain of sand (or a phone, which 'may as well be a conch/from off the beach'). This is a restless, Janus-faced collection, simultaneously looking back on childhood memories of Bermuda ('alive, fresh as raw meat') and thirstily drinking in the details of the wider world. --Jacob Silkstone, editor of The Missing Slate Nancy Anne Miller's poems embrace island icons with a ruthless tenderness, teasing out their secrets and accepting with equal enthusiasm their surface beauty and their burdened hearts. Miller approaches the island's difficult colonial history from a position of exile and with a wondrous ability to find and restore the paradisiacal as she explores the mysteries of one place through the lens of the other. --Kim Aubrey, author of What We Hold in Our Hands Like hand-cut stones strung along a necklace, each of Miller's poems is its own gem. Untethered by theme, each page is a new discovery: a childhood memory, a lusty evocation of the landscape, an observation of passersby. We journey into these experiences finding fresh perspectives on our Island home. The imagery is alive; the author makes nature an active character. --Lisa Howie, Director of Bermuda National Gallery With a painter's eye, Nancy Anne Miller reveals the complexity of a British semitropical island almost seven hundred miles out at sea. Her use of simile and image metaphor at work in each poem, echo and reinforce the constant comparison of two very different cultures. The reader is in a house of mirrors as each poem turns them into an immigrant traversing a colonial childhood, the surreal trappings of tourism, the effects of weather and ocean on identity, and note a class system where the remnants of slavery still reside.