Beverly Pepper (1922–2020)

Although essentially prose (if what is meant by essence is form)Midnights can just as well (as in, I am doing very well, thank you) be called poetry. If for no other reason than that Miller is best known as a poet. Midnights was published by Saturnalia as number 4 in a series of collaborations between artists and writers. Miller's prose/poetry has been fortuitously paired here with the black and white oil stick drawings of Beverly Pepper. With their hatch-lines and massed shapes, the show more drawings, while not illustrative, serve well to reinforce/ re-express the emotional intensity (grief, anxiety, pain)of Miller's words.
I bought this book at the University of Arizona bookstore (where Miller is a Prof of English) while on vacation in Tucson and in complement to her A Palace of Pearls, which I purchased in the same bookstore on almost the same vacation a year ago. Such personal details (references) are entirely in keeping with the book itself, which is a weave or relationship of such details: the senile debility of a mother, the shattering breakup of lover and beloved (how one fights for love and mourns for love by tooth and claw, by dream and drug and discipline). Everyone is named in Midnights. No one remains anonymous. Or so we are told. There are the suicides, the precursors, Celan and Woolf. And the famous and the unfamous dead: the girls thrown out of the bed of a pickup; Anne Frank in Amsterdam, 1944; the lover's murdered first love, the "husband"-friend's father's blowing his brains out, etc. But there is much more: art, music, food, too much drink, beaches, hotel rooms and private residences in many locales (Berkeley, Tucson, Amsterdam, Italy, China . . .). There are so many friends.
Miller's self-absorption inlove and loss, however, wears me out. show less

Nice book, not so wild about the art