In her superb Carnaval, Susan L. Miller’s latest poetry collection, we find the fragile intimacies of friendship and the heartbreak of their loss, as well as—among other motifs—expansive poems about Mexico’s culture and people, a country she knows well from her many travels.

Starting off the first section is “Polaroid Transfers,” which delves into the memory of an old friend with impactful lines of deft fluidity, such as the one below, whose images concatenate both homophonically and contrapuntally as in the final turn with its stark declarative.

     You’ve sent your recent photographs: winter
with black tree and whirling light, sepia bloodroot,
     vase of thistles by your window—
but this dune I like best.

There is considerable delight in how the poem layers its details as in the lines below, including the alliterative flair of this first simile. In fact, Miller’s textures throughout the collection are exquisite.

    how I ran like a sidewinder in sand? Now I live
in sand, perfect crease of this dune separating dark from light.
    Every so often, I hear from you: caves in Colorado, camera
in hand. Hibiscus grows in your arid climate, bristles
    into bloom between stiff leaves. Lately, nothing grows here,
but I watch your photograph for signs: wind, maybe. Desert snow.

The crown of sonnets “Thorns and Dust,” an elegy on the loss of a dear friend to an infection, so delicate with its hues of Rilkean sadness, is the jewel in the crown, so to speak, of the collection. The superlative craft is a revelation, the wisdom of its mediations exemplary, never facile or gimmicky as with lesser hands. How adroit too are its rhymes, ranging from the elegant to the ludic. I love too how the details, so richly evocative, cascade like water in stanza 1:

…Two months ago
at B bar, I watched you and Julie swoon
against each other laughing, your pale throat
exposed, her red hat bobbing in the blue
haze of the gin I nursed. It’s the one pure
thing, I thought, the friendship between those two.
That wise, complicit laugh: we’ve all been sure
we’ll never die, but you make me believe
you’ve seduced death and won. I’ll never grieve.

As the last line carries into stanza 2, we are startled to wonder if the body can outsmart death—by seduction, no less—with “pills doled out from the local pharmacy.” Can any medicine deceive a virus, “deter its harm en route to all [the] cells”? The answer is blunt, as delivered by the last line: “Nature devours what’s prettier than it is.” As the former moves into stanza 3, we are left with the brutal realization, rendered in beautiful language, of the world as

… a gorgeous waste
of gorgeous flesh, of eyes and lips, and floating
on the waves of dizzy heat, we’re spent,
breathless, wax-winged, storm-tossed and radiant.

Stanza 5 offers this startling vision of paradise in lines of gripping muscularity:

If we’re in hell, then what is paradise?
I think they must be very much alike:
two dance-halls full of grinding hips and thighs,
a music thick with beats, and at the mic,
a glorious soprano androgyne
whose voice enters not the ear but the vein.

One novel form in this book, and a welcome surprise to me, was the four-stanza tretina, derived from the sestina, so playfully conceived in “Diagnosis.”

The poem’s second section, “La vida es un carnaval,” focuses primarily on her travels in Mexico. There are painterly portraits as in the gorgeous “Cochineal”:

This red:
the body and blood
of an insect. Her price is

second only to gold
because of
the children’s fingers,

ginger, which
collect her
between thorns.

However, not all is pleasing to this poet-traveler, as in the rather visceral “Rabbit” with its image of the animal “split from belly to chin” and that of a man who “pulled the intestines / into the cold like a string of beads.” (The allusion to the rosary is keenly made.)

“Rabbit” appears to embrace, indeed honor, those gritty and disquieting experiences that others might find repulsive or abhorrent. Culture shock is not the point of these poems. I sense more a certain kind of wonder, however morbid it might appear. The poet knows that her place is not to criticize or judge but to inhabit this Otherness with patience and grace:

...I heard
a pop as each steaming ball worked free
of its flesh. As for the rabbit-faced man,
he whistles through rabbit teeth.
When he comes, he leaves the sheets
smeared with blood and fur.

To be open-hearted and alert to Mexico’s transformative mysteries is key to Miller, an inveterate traveler, who perceives the sacred in the knife that pierced the goat’s breast in the companion “The Sacrificial Goat”:

It is said he moaned quietly, but did not fight
when the knife pierced his breast. Doped

by the villagers’ dancing, having watched
his brother paraded on their shoulders,

crowned with fresh flowers, he might
have expected similar celebration....

In “Cholula” we find not a tourist looking for local color but more a seeker of “peace” who wants to be “fed and made whole,” knowing now that there was indeed something inside her “that wanted saving,” a revisioning that comes to fruition in the later “Reading Graham Greene in Oaxaca”:

The trouble with Mexico, for me,
was the same trouble I brought with me. I
shuddered at the sight of the giant blackened Christ
crucified on the museum wall. His body dark
with soot and dried blood, his skinny ribs clutched
by his hanging skin, that was the end of despair,
the particular sin
that on the worst days I found I indulged in.

The second sequence, entitled “Feast of the Assumption: San Cristobal,” further delves into the spiritual with penetrating effect, as in the complex commingling of the sacred and the profane, which is so defining of Mexico’s baroqueness, its carnivalesque symbiosis of the carnal and the divine:

...Horns
and guitars began a song that Celia Cruz used to sing.
In front of the band, two men—drunk or demented, or

both—danced with rubber knees, crashed into each other,
struggled to push each other off the patio. A boy sneaked
out of church without his mother, wiggling his butt.

Inside, among lilies and candles, a Baroque Virgin
of the Assumption rose in tulle on the back wall. The church
celebrated a hundred years; her congregants clustered

at Mass while outside the party blasted on.

Indeed, the Spanish carnaval, and our carnival, both derive from the Latin carne, flesh. I recall in my last visit to the Yucatan many decades ago a bar that had three clippings on its wall (a trinity?) of a machine-gun Rambo, a girl in a bikini, and the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Mexico continues to be the wellspring of Miller’s rich imagination, which reappears in the book’s final section, Con el pincel extranjero, where we find the third and last sequence “Birds of Mexico,” a carnivalesque tour de force drenched in particulars that go beyond showing but more toward witnessing, as in the fifth stanza:

We walk
through the markets, past the women selling
gardenias and marigolds, the pastries,
the piles of carefully folded tablecloths
and blouses.

Miller’s Carnaval is so accomplished in both execution and imagining that it surely merits a devoted readership.

Orlando Ricardo Menes is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Notre Dame and the author of eight poetry collections, including The Gospel of Wildflowers & Weeds (2022), Memoria (2019), Heresies (2015), and Fetish (2013), winner of the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. His next poetry collection, entitled Origins, will be published by Slant Books in 2027. 

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