The Milk Hours: Poems

By John James and Henri Cole

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize: A “luminous [and] memorable” debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss (Publishers Weekly).

“We lived overlooking the walls overlooking the cemetery.” So begins the title poem of this collection, whose recursive temporality is filled with living, grieving things, punctuated by an unseen world of roots, bodies, and concealed histories. Like a cemetery, too, The Milk Hours sets unlikely neighbors alongside each other: Hegel and Murakami, Melville and the Persian astronomer al-Sufi, enacting a transhistorical poetics even as it brims with intimacy. These are poems of frequent swerves and transformations, which never stray far from an engagement with science, geography, art, and aesthetics, nor from the dream logic that motivates their incessant investigations.

While John James begins with the biographical—the haunting loss of a father in childhood, the exhausted hours of early fatherhood—the questions that emerge from his poetic synthesis are both timely and universal: What is it to be human in an era where nature and culture have fused? To live in a time of political and environmental upheaval, of both personal and public loss? How do we make meaning, and to whom—or what—do we turn, when such boundaries so radically collapse?

“A poet of staggering lyricism, intricate without ever obscuring his intent. Quite simply, The Milk Hours announces the arrival of a great new talent in American poetry.” —Shelf Awareness

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781571317247

John James

John James is the pastor of Crossway Church, Birmingham (UK) and the author of Renewal: Church Revitalisation along the Way of the Cross.

Book preview

The Milk Hours

for J.E.J., 1962–1993

and C.S.M.J., 2013–

We lived overlooking the walls overlooking the cemetery.

The cemetery is where my father remains. We walked

in the garden for what seemed like an hour but in reality must

have been days. Cattail, heartseed—these words mean nothing to me.

The room opens up into white and more white, sun outside

between steeples. I remember, now, the milk hours, leaning

over my daughter’s crib, dropping her ten, twelve pounds

into the limp arms of her mother. The suckling sound as I crashed

into sleep. My daughter, my father—his son. The wet grass

dew-speckled above him. His face grows vague and then vaguer.

From our porch I watch snow fall on bare firs. Why does it

matter now—what gun, what type. Bluesmoke rises. The chopped

copses glisten. Snowmelt smoothes the stone cuts of his name.

§

History (n.)

I didn’t make these verses because I wanted to rival that fellow, or his poems,

in artistry—I knew that wouldn’t be easy—but to test what certain dreams

of mine might be saying and to acquit myself of any impiety, just in case they

might be repeatedly commanding me to make this music.

—Plato, Phaedo

Viewed from space, the Chilean volcano blooms.

I cannot see it. It’s a problem of scale. History—the branch

of knowledge dealing with past events; a continuous,

systematic narrative of; aggregate deeds; acts, ideas, events

that will shape the course of the future; immediate

but significant happenings; finished, done with—he’s history.

—

Calbuco: men shoveling ash from the street.

Third time in a week. And counting.

Infinite antithesis. Eleven

miles of ash in the air. What to call it—

just ash. They flee to Ensenada.

—

The power of motives does not proceed directly from the will—

a changed form of knowledge. Wind pushing

clouds toward Argentina. Knowledge is merely involved.

Ash falls, it is falling, it has fallen. Will fall. Already flights

cancelled in Buenos Aires. I want to call it snow—

what settles on the luma trees, their fruit black, purplish black,

soot-speckled, hermaphroditic—if this book is unintelligible

and hard on the ears—the oblong ovals of its leaves.

Amos, fragrant. Family name Myrtus. The wood is extremely