Tender the River Reviewed by Caitlin Cowan

Tender the River by Matt W. Miller

Reviewed by Caitlin Cowan

Texas Review Press (April 6, 2021)

ISBN-13 : 978-1-68003-224-6

I Shall Drown Your Books: A Review of Matt W. Miller’s Tender the River

Tender the River could have gotten it wrong. As a white male author’s interrogation of New England’s history and its consequences both personal and public, Matt W. Miller’s fourth collection of poetry is the kind of book that you might worry will be out of touch with our cultural reckoning with race and privilege in America. But Miller’s poems tackle the numerous legacies of oppression that have shaped the country, and more specifically, Lowell, Massachusetts, with the force of a seasoned linebacker. 

The book’s titular river dances its way through Lowell and through Miller’s frank reconsiderations of American mythology from the collection’s first pages. “Invocation at the Merrimack” announces the water as the speaker’s muse in a tone that is both high-minded and frankly sexual. Not what you were expecting? Good. That feeling will linger throughout the entirety of this remarkable book. Here, the speaker summons the spirit of the river and lavishes praise upon its tough beauty in lines like “your mouth / of stones, your clavicle // of roil and moan.” 

The river itself speaks when invited in several other poems, including three in a series of poems whose titles begin with “Said the River…” The Merrimack knows what men do not: the infinite ebb and flow of life on earth, the secrets we attempt to drown in the water’s open veins, and the biggest secret of them all—that the natural world will win in the end, putting an end to our petty striving.

……………………I shall riot above 

…………..all bulwarks and towers and I shall drown 

………………your books and bearded lies.

…………..(“Said the River When I Begged for Her Song”)

It’s against this watery backdrop that the denizens of Lowell and its environs are situated, tinging their dramas with a darkness that is both damning and laced with womblike, mothering forgiveness. Out of the darkness of racism, exploitative labor, gang violence, disease, and genocide glimmers the possibility, though not the certainty, of something more and better for us all. 

Full of dexterous formal choices, Miller offers ghazals, hexaëmera, and more in this collection. “Textile Triolet” is a formidable wall of text built brick-by-brick from dense onomatopoeic syllables (“schika tak schika taka”) meant to mimic the sound of a textile mill and drown the through-line of the poem, a voice attempting to tell the truth about the victimization of workers. It’s in poems like these that we can grasp the power of poetry to speak politically, to do what so many history textbooks can’t or won’t do: center the experience of those most vulnerable in their society.

From the book’s opening poem, “Autobiography”—in which the speaker admits “we filched the horizon”—to a later poem titled “On My Mom Showing Me that Photo of Gram and Aunt Althea in Blackface,” we are attuned to the idea of appropriation, of stolen land, cultural markers, identities, livelihoods, and lives. The book flips back and forth between the erasures of the past and the forgotten peoples in our present like sister slides in a carousel projector, sometimes within the confines of a single poem.

The refrain word in “Ghazal: Augumtoocooke” is the name of the land now known as Dracut, Massachusetts before it was colonized in the middle of the 17th century. Once the site of important native Pennacook settlements, in the poem, the land is fetishized and mythologized by white solace-seekers as a place to commune with the land in an erasure as exploitative as its original theft. But the speaker is not willing to engage in the erasure of the violence that was done there or, generations later, his own complicity in it:

…………..Such bullshit. Nothing but what I took, what I take and take, what I break to make my egg

…………..bob in some unpoisoned pond where I can drop a line, some kind of Augumtoocooke

…………..of my mind. But it’s not mine. It’s a land apart, outside time, and ever our infinite theft

…………..milled from the sagging pines of this Augumtoocooke, Augumtoocooke, Augumtoocooke.

The poem shows us again and again what can’t be seen, what has been wiped out, what is hidden in plain sight. The speaker looks at the wasteland of late capitalism that has obscured the land’s history and chides himself for ever thinking that he could be absolved from the theft and erasure all around him. 

The high-toned learned forms that pepper Tender the River are often coupled with raw innovation within the forms themselves and are also tempered with free verse that seems as warm and casual as a barstool conversation. These poems are written in the descriptive grammar of the native sons who walk Lowell’s streets. “Boys Beyond June,” for example, starts out this way:

…………..My brother and I played Little League

…………..with Marcus and oh shit that kid could hit

…………..and just lights out at short I mean

The internet has further increased our familiarity with the visual look of text written in a stream-of-consciousness fashion, but reading Miller’s seemingly off-the-cuff lines fills one’s head with an actual, human voice. The narratives relayed in poems like this one, “Then I Let the Alpine Play,” and “Third Day, Friday, May 1, 1992” emanate clearly from a storyteller with deep roots in New England, and one has the sense that the tales are being told right to them, perhaps with a steadying drink in hand. 

But the subject matter of these poems in particular—the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the lack of fear young white boys have of the police, and a childhood friend who later took a machete-blow to the skull—casts a shadow of violence that sometimes strikes but mostly leaves the poem’s (white) characters alone. And that privilege is something that the speaker is very willing to admit. “Third Day” closes with an image that highlights the differences between families of color and white families like the speaker’s own:

……………………….we white kids rolled out

…………..rolled home where the fire for us was just on TV

The speaker of these poems isn’t looking for a medal for acknowledging the comparative ease of his existence. But he seems to be a man at the end of time and at the dawn of a new age at once, though the sun rises slowly. An epistle to the speaker’s child emerges in the book’s penultimate section, a dense and pop culture-laden prose poem of contrast and effusive praise that highlights the blissful but privileged naïveté of the speaker’s own youth alongside the daughter’s comparatively thornier adolescence.

As a prelude to the hopeful “A Crack of Light,” which comprises the book’s final section, “To My Daughter at Thirteen” is clear-headed about the difference between a young boy’s childhood and a young girl’s childhood. And the dangerous and unfair world that the daughter seems poised to inherit—full of discarded dolls, broken hearts, mean cool girls, and even, yes, “getting laid”—simultaneously worries and thrills the speaker, who sees in his child the chance to do better than even he has done:

…………..I was a coward like the rest while you statue outside your school to protest gun violence,

…………..while you draw pictures where every woman is the right kind of beautiful, while you get

…………..yourself up in the blue black dawn for a world you know will come at you with claws. . .

“A Crack of Light” itself is a rangy, multi-part poem that casts about for a way to atone for the past. “And now to say I’m sorry for our history / becomes a too convenient apology // for those bricks stacked on brown backs, / and mortared by young girls’ blood,” the speaker admits. The way forward, he believes, is in treating others the way his “Sunday School” God who “didn’t show” ought to have treated him, and all of us:

…………..So if now is a wound that will not heal

…………..and all of our fingers slick upon the pommel,

…………..red on a shuttle thrown between this weft,

…………..this we woven through one warp of earth,

…………..then all I can do is love you. All of you.

In a bit of praise in the book’s first pages, poet John Murillo describes Tender the River as “Beautiful as a bespoke three-piece, useful as a pair of hand-crafted brogues.” And while the level of craftsmanship in these poems is impeccable, aesthetically, Miller’s red-blooded yet warmhearted verse is so devoted to music and to the human voice that it’s hard to liken the poems to objects or to utilitarian aesthetics at all. 

If these poems are useful, they are useful in that they show us how to be tender in a culture that has made us hard, how to see the bolts of pain and violence that run through even the cleanest rivers and the most innocuous moments of childhood. The river will win out, we know, taking us back to the equality of the muddy banks we rose from. The question Miller’s book asks is who will get to share the light and who will keep it burning between now and then.

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Caitlin Cowan’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in The Rumpus, New Ohio Review, Missouri Review, Denver Quarterly, SmokeLong Quarterly, Rappahannock Review, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in English and has taught writing at the University of North Texas, Texas Woman’s University, and Interlochen Center for the Arts. She serves as an Associate Poetry Editor for Pleiades and works, travels, and teaches for Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in Twin Lake, Michigan. Find her at caitlincowan.com.