Date of Review:

12/18/2007

Published Work:

Reviewer:

Marian Haddad

Source:

San Antonio Express-News

Review Excerpt:

A musician himself, San Antonio poet Bryce Milligan seems to have inherited a portion of the musical abilities of predecessors such as Stevens and Roethke. What a joy and a reconfirmation of lyric poetry to find a contemporary poet who is clearly well-versed in formal poetics and who can adeptly weave these tenets (inner rhymes, pacing and cadences), gracefully, unpretentiously and effectively throughout a free-verse poem.

In Alms for Oblivion, a mythic, book-length poem to be published this fall, Milligan does just this. Alms is an exploration of the reality of the muse "and the manicured miracles / of her art." Milligan points to the sureness of her existence, perhaps latent at times, but reminds us of the constant returning. She returns long after the old memories, "recalling all for me now in a scrawl / I could always decipher as easily as my own."

Intertwined with Milligan's meditations on the muse is his attention to the motion and presentation of words, to the art of sound and sense, of sync and time, and of almost-hypnotic rhythmic tendencies. Author Ed Hirsch affirms: "Bryce Milligan is a contemporary Muse poet, a passionate singer of 'the idol at this crossroads.'"

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