Can You Smell the Rain?

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’s poetry collection Can You Smell the Rain? envelopes readers in the shadow and shape of the sensual world. Miller’s rapturous attention to detail and her deft sense of story conjure a poetic genealogy, swirling and swooning with ancestors, lovers, and earthly delights. Cleary Miller writes "I do not want to jar the music in my body, / I want to keep the thrumming deep inside of me." These words exude the radiance of a poet who relishes solitude as fervently as she embraces the clamor of a vibrant, complex world.

Here are exquisite poems of lived experience and artistic technique. In them stir compassion, conflict, love, faith, music, grief, history, and an unwavering observation of both a wider world and the recesses of the human heart. The often spare language, the open idiom, at times deceptively simple, draws one into a presence that is rich and complex and true.

These are poems (or, I would say, this is a lyric memoir) lush with vivid and vivifying particulars.

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.