This collection of poetry by Gary Miranda includes Listeners at the Breathing Place, which won the Princeton Contemporary Poetry competition and was published by Princeton University Press; Grace Period, also published by Princeton University Press; Turning Sixty, published by Zoland Books; and a translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, published most recently by Tavern Books.
Praise for Gary Miranda’s poetry:
“Miranda’s best is breathtaking. Beyond the words, whatever is is light. A poet who can make us know, with this intensity, what we may do when the words each into silence, even the silence between the stars, has begun to tell us of the place for love. Certainly we can want no better.”  —Michael Heffernan, Poetry
 And for his translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies:
 “At last here is a translation of Rilke that retains the brilliance of the original. Throw away all your other translations of the Duino Elegies and get this one.”  —Robin Skelton, The Malahat Review
This collection of poetry by Gary Miranda includes Listeners at the Breathing Place, which won the Princeton Contemporary Poetry competition and was published by Princeton University Press; Grace Period, also published by Princeton University Press; Turning Sixty, published by Zoland Books; and a translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, published most recently by Tavern Books.
Praise for Gary Miranda’s poetry:
“Miranda’s best is breathtaking. Beyond the words, whatever is is light. A poet who can make us know, with this intensity, what we may do when the words each into silence, even the silence between the stars, has begun to tell us of the place for love. Certainly we can want no better.”  —Michael Heffernan, Poetry
 And for his translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies:
 “At last here is a translation of Rilke that retains the brilliance of the original. Throw away all your other translations of the Duino Elegies and get this one.”  —Robin Skelton, The Malahat Review
Arrowhead
First, you must find a rock
that has always wanted to be
a bird: to sing, fly.
It is hard.
Next, you must chip awayÂ
its minor desire, respecters
of ground, moss; the irrelevantÂ
sparks.
You must shape it into the un-
romanticized heart: tongue
for the deep kiss, shoulders
for holding.
Finally,
you must teach it to cover
its tracks. Wind-breaker,
it must learn
to mend the shards of air
as it goes, swift, tender,
to the bone. It is
hard.
Like Snow
Some people would remember iron
railings, the color of buildings,
how a dog circled three times
before settling in—novelists,
certainly, or just good talkers.
Most of us take only the light
from a place, and translate even that
into the way our spirits shapeÂ
the light. We flash into knowledge,
which, if we ignore it, will not forgive us.
Objects can survive fine on their own,
but the feel for how this face, that
window, falls upon the momentary
way we hold ourselves could easily
get lost, and who would find it?
Such loss, if lived with, stiffens
into pain; it stands up, starched
and handsome, ready to please the neighbors.
We find ourselves forgetting dreams, whole
days, the last time we were honest;
we ask ourselves: say something
in childhood, and feel only the weight
of what that means brush against
our face like snow. “Like snow,”
we say, not even coming close.
Collision
Moon, stars, an apology of constellations
ride the freeway toward this ample, if
somewhat routine, accident. You lie there,
your life reduced to physics, the laws
of light, the laws of inertia.
You try to remember the acronym
for the rainbow’s colors—a man’s name.
You know it is not Yves Bonnefoy.
You think of Father Falsetto, who gave youÂ
your only C, in physics. You think
of the time he caught you in the boys’ roomÂ
dispensing the paper towel roll onto the floor
and gave you a sermon on waste. “Senseless,”
he said, turning, and you stood there
wondering why you had done it: something
about a river or the way sound
travels. How did they get those voicesÂ
into the wires, really? Or, if they did,Â
how explain portable radios? So many
things to learn. . . . Roy G.
Biv! red, orange, yellow, green. . . .
A state trooper puts his face so close
to yours he looks like a giant bug
in a horror movie. “Blue,” you say.
“Indigo,” you say. “Violet.”
It seems to work. The face is human
now, but you have become the luckless
hero, the only one who has seen the monster
and whom no one will believe. Save
your breath, you start to think, then
stop, to think:Â Save your breath!
You wonder if you will ever speak again,
and did you say “violet” or “violent”?
It makes such a difference, unless. . .
unless. . . . They are lifting you up:
through the glare of headlights—or perhaps
the backs of your eyelids—the moon,Â
the stars, collide in a metaphor
for all you had wanted your life
to be. Violet. Violent.
Boy Playing Kick-the-Can
Stock-upright behind the trunk of the oak,
he has grafted himself to the tree, as far
as he’s concerned,
and is not concerned with the world behind him
that has no eyes and is no threat.
Like the man who left his wife for a day
and stayed away for twenty years,
our boy’s a sure bet for endurance.
The shouts of his playmates
making their bids for the can
and winning or losing
are facts from a different plane
from the one he moves—or, rather,
stands still—on. He has mastered
the art of detachment
and cannot be governed by time’s unsubtle tricks.
If the sun goes down, if his mother calls and calls,
he will hug this oak with his shoulder
like Pyramus at the wall:
untroubled, faithful.
This silence sets him apart,
and if he breathes at all
it is only as loud as the sound of the oak tree
growing.
“What the plant is by an act not its own. . .
that must thou make thyself to become,”
as Coleridge says. And he does.
He is taking root as the summer evening noises—
muffled dogbarks, horns from a distantÂ
freeway—float his way like a quiet breeze
and ruffle the leaves of his hair,
but very gently.
The Gardener
Poetry he would hardly have understood,
or countenanced.
Frost, to him, was what killed flowers.
He knew that well enough.
Camellia, mum, sweet William:
he labeled them all with Popsicle sticks
his grandchildren bequeathed.
Out in the garden,
his shoes like moldy loaves of bread,
his overcoat undone,
he strove like any surgeon to preserve.
Goldfish could survive the cold,
locked in their stone sea,
but flowers couldn’t.
The breath from his mouth made daisies
in the air;
the real ones died, always.
And so it was
he recognized death when he saw it coming,
blue and clumsy, to claim his lungs.
Even in his dreams you could watch himÂ
digging in against it,
crouching to ward it off:
he would lodge his palms for warmth
against his chest, testing the soil
with the tips of his fingers.
The odds didn’t matter.
It had never been a question of outcome.
Ars Poetica
Ambiance, feckless, ineluctable:
sometimes you think it would all be clear
if you merely increased your vocabulary,
learning words that line up possibilities
like birds on a wire, or clothespins.
The real trick is to let the whole
menagerie of undone acts leap toward you
so that your surprise is not an act—or,
if an act, an act of recognition you’ve
been saving expressly for strangers.
Commas, quarter-moons, kindnesses:
those metal humps on bridges that the car
goes over and you know there is noÂ
cause for alarm. You gather them inÂ
with, almost, love. They take you home.
The Must-Be-Admired Things is an anthology of poems by Gary Miranda. A respected poet in his own right, Miranda's works have featured in a plethora of publications, including the American Scholar, West Coast Review and The New Yorker. This singular title marks a compilation of four previously published books and is a reflection of years of hard work invested by Miranda into his craft. And it is those years of devotion that really shines through because of it.
Miranda's diverse range of poems, spanning those of only a few stanzas to multiple pages long, draws extensively on lived experiences. Many of the selected poems are further heightened in their imagery by clever observations that reflect the natural world. A particular favourite, "Visibilities" (originally published in Grace Period) brings the two worlds of humanity and fellow creature together to tap into the innocence of humans as being the only species who admire the skill and form of the natural world. After reading this poem, birdwatching trip at the lake will never be the same again.
Every one of the poems in this book is perfectly balanced and weighted. The tempo and bounce to each fits perfectly with the topics at hand (with those tackling harder discussions being punchier and direct, versus those that read with the slow-tempo ease of something written in the back of a rowing boat on calm waters). While reading this title it is incredibly easy to randomly land on a page and find a poem to best suit a mood for any given day. I had begun jotting down some choice lines to drop into my everyday conversations when I had to stop, the pages were filling up that fast.
There are few people who I would dissuade from reading The Must-Be-Admired Things. When then poetry is as carefree as this, it is of no surprise Miranda has as many publishing credits as he does.
AEB Reviews