Can You Smell the Rain? poses the old theatrical question, Who wants what, and why can’t they have it? Her confused and characters take themselves seriously as they yearn for love. With wit and gently biting satire, the poet presents their struggles. Beware: a snicker at these characters is a snicker at yourself. Whether the scene is a French-speaking convent school in Kansas City or an Irish-American woman’s further coming of age as a Radcliffe student, wife, mother, poet, or world traveler, Miller’s true journey is an interior one marked by a radiant wit and a sensuous appreciation for life itself.
Patricia Cleary Miller
Patricia Cleary Miller is professor emerita of English at Rockhurst University, where she founded and edited the Rockhurst Review. She is the author of Starting a Swan Dive (Daniel S. Brenner Award) from BkMk Press, as well as the poetry titles Dresden and Crimson Lights, and the nonfiction title Westport: Missouri’s Port of Many Returns. Her work has appeared in Stand, Connecticut Review, New Letters, I-70 Review, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Radcliffe College (where she also held a Bunting fellowship), the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the University of Kansas. For eight years she was poet laureate of the Harvard Alumni Association. She is a past president of the Writers Place and won its annual Muse Award.