The Gavel’s Impact: On Wayne Miller’s We the Jury

This fifth book of poetry by Wayne Miller, a catalog and career spent making deceptively small observations and connecting the personal to the broad inertias of history, is not a volume that pretends to have answers. It does not propose an argument. It merely presents what is with an atmosphere of calm acceptance. Acceptance, of course, does not constitute agreement, and the poems in We the Jury embody critiques of human violence and American violence and how those relate to the slow violence of our dystopian present. At times, Miller pilots a morbid curiosity of biology, the distinction between “dying” and “dead.” The author juxtaposes this wider, more abstract philosophizing with more intimate fare: observations of personal loss, familial failures, images of renewal in the form of curious and needy children. Miller does not use this latter to dilute his book with something so misleading as hope. Rather, these poems unfold with the same sense of acceptance and acknowledgment as the rest of We the Jury: just as there has been a past, there will be a future. Together, these not-disparate elements showcase the current state of American humanity, a decrepit decadence that we share responsibility for even as it affects us. Despite the book’s ambitious scope, its language grounds the reader, rendering the poems and their big ideas relatable, accessible, in some cases indicting visitors to the page.

The book’s short, direct sentences work well to carry the heaviness of their meaning. With most poems made of short lines and broken into short free verse stanzas of varying length, these statements are given room to breathe, letting the collection become driven by atmosphere and implication. The author does not often have his poems deliver explicit judgment on their own, but their observations and presentation lead the reader to an intended conclusion—Miller positions his lens, and we see ourselves, from a handprint on a fogged window to contemplations of how the present will manifest as future history. The book is broken into four unnamed eight-poem sections (plus a cold open), and many of the poems are themselves sectioned, but the resulting effect is less about symbolizing ideas of division than about letting the poems’ straightforward observations and phrasing resonate into the blankness. Silence is a sonic tool, and white space has visual meaning, and Miller leverages these skillfully and confidently, directing readers’ attention to the spare yet self-assured language of his work.

We the Jury is a book best enjoyed in a single, reflective sitting—and surely repeat visits later on—from the collection’s opening pair of lines, which baldly couples capitalism and death, the author is, poem by poem, section by section, compiling new and recurring fascinations, directing attentions to unexplicated juxtapositions, delivered through profound and simple formulations. Though the focus and momentary topic are constantly shifting, the pace of the collection never feels rushed, thanks to the arrangement of lines and blankness, and the book achieves a unified, cumulative effect: no matter how we perceive them, the elements throughout this book are not unconnected. This is not a book about separation—IVF and rain and racism are all things that exist alongside one another.

In “Stages on a Journey Westward,” Miller reaches a contender for the core of the book: “Here in America / we are engines // drowning out what lies / beyond our interiors.” He quickly follows this section with an anecdote about a child defecating in a hotel pool. The attention given to intimate family moments, and the attention given to any subject that appears, shows that while individual things may capture our physical brains for a short time—often out of physical necessity—that doesn’t mean the rest of the world stops moving. This accumulation, “the weight of our entire existence”, comes to a head in the collection’s title poem. Just as all these topics exist simultaneously, all of us who live exist simultaneously, and the word “We” on the cover of the book, as well as throughout this poem, points us towards collective accountability. The world weighs on us, and we weigh on the world. In the face of dystopian stagnation wrought by our own humanness, any potential solution must come from the plural.