Book Review

In Ezra Miles’s The Signalman, the weight of silence and solitude lowers and reshapes an individual during extended periods of time. The verses in Miles’s debut collection focus on the poet’s time working in a rural signalbox, a place where the isolation eventually leads the poems’ speaker into various conversations with God. Simultaneously, the speaker also focuses on the harsh, ecologically fragile landscape where the “willow tree outside shifts its weight,” and leaves both the reader and the speaker asking: “And what is it to be seen?”

The signalman’s stark loneliness establishes itself in one of the collection’s initial poems, “Passing Ships.” The couplet form and enjambment mimic the emotional and social fractures experienced by the signalman. Emerging in the poem, too, is the speaker’s sense of loss as well as their existential self-questioning: “That you could find it // if you only knew where to look, and of course you don’t.” Compounding the sense of loss and internal doubt are carefully placed questions such as “And what is it to be seen?” and the acknowledgement that “When someone looks / at you you exist again.” The personification of nature is also paramount to the poem. A willow tree “shifts its weight” and “hard white stars begin to talk like colleagues in a bank.” The references to industrial and business places, like banks, juxtaposes the wildness, the isolation, and the natural elements dominating the poem. In turn, the references to industry and business, and the literal busy-ness they impose on society, separate the human world from the natural one, and the speaker stands as a figure, at times balancing the two. More so, however, the speaker is a figure immersed in the natural world while belonging to the human one, and the loneliness the speaker projects is a consequence of working in such a desolate place.

“Flesh and Water” is a beautifully romantic and elegant poem relying on second-person point of view in order to create an emotional transfer of a transcendental experience. Meditational and prayer-like, it is a gorgeous rendering of an experience in which the speaker fully communes with nature by swimming. Again, the couplets and enjambment create the emotional force:

You, pink heeled and silken,
swimming in the silty darkness,

movements drunk by the tide,
the sky beside itself with speckles.

The slight rhymes of words like “by,” “tide,” and “sky” help move the lines and the emotion forward by creating a gliding effect that resembles the swimming and the movements. Again, nature’s personification is imperative to the poem’s tone and imagery. The wind takes on the role of a fickle lover, one who “kisses” and then “disregards.” The coldness, too, is personified. According to the speaker, it swims, and the poem’s final line—“you pull close as you tremble”—alludes to the act of withdrawing into one’s self.

“Solar Power” possesses the romantic nature of “Flesh and Water.” However, it is more direct, the speaker more passionate in their desire. The speaker describes the mysterious “you” as a “mutual skeleton of urge,” a description that adds a tinge of mortality and futility to the poem. Nonetheless, a “duty calls” and the speaker declares, “I have to go.” The brevity of these statements creates the poem’s urgency. Longer declarations temper the speaker’s haste:

We shall live once, yet it seems
already a thousand turns of the cup.

I’d shut down the country for you.
I would siege Nineveh. I’d die in my boots […]

“Shut down” and “siege, as well as the proclamation “I’d die in my boots,” add a militaristic tone. This tone quickly dissipates as the poem concludes and the speaker continues:

for one more morning of you, your breath
ghosts its fog like a perishing god.

Words like “ghosts” and “fog” create a sense of mysticism, and the phrase “perishing god” is striking, producing a sense of the past’s dissipation.

As the collection concludes, “View from the Fairway” is a poem which again shows the clash of the human world with the natural one. The poem opens with the speaker “Coming through the gate” and treading “the dappled path / of the manicured golf course” and “passing in / between hooded pines.” The gate acts as a kind of portal from one world into another. The speaker’s passage through the area reminds them that they “give nothing to this place.” Thus, the speaker’s relationship with this area is not reciprocal. The speaker performs what seems like rituals as they “take the coo and purr of woodpigeons mating” and “hope for a nest to be built / here, some caved abode for a glowing egg.” This communion with nature leads to a moment of spiritual awareness of “the only thing” they “cannot keep: a sureness / of the sureness by which His hand shields.” What makes this particular poem even more special is the positive advice with which it leaves readers. The speaker encourages their audience to “Linger in the musk of life in spite of life itself” and to grasp “goodness”—a “strange gift”—and take it as their own.

If the British Romantics and the American Transcendentalists ever looked for a poet who is the reincarnation of the environmental and ecological poetics their movements espoused, then surely they would find it in Ezra Miles. Miles’s poetry brings a fresh and cohesive philosophical and spiritual take on concepts like human-nature interactions, individuality, and selfhood. The Signalman is an illuminating gift to the literary world, and it will leave readers anxious for Miles’s next poetic pursuits.