Review: We the Jury by Mandana Chaffa

We the Jury: Poems

Written by: Wayne Miller

Review by: Mandana Chaffa

Milkweed Editions

Paperback $16

In the prologue of his newest book, We the Jury, Wayne Miller starkly sets the stage for the poem—and collection—to follow, addressing Death as both nation and ultimate combatant, one destined to vanquish and anguish us. Knowing what it cannot retreat from or reject, humanity’s only option is “. . .to expand our relationship / with Death” which inherently also asks us to investigate our relationship with Life.

A sharply conceived and exquisitely written collection, even the most detailed description of its contents short-shrifts the accretive effects of moving from poem to poem. Visually, spare-worded titles in all caps lead to a simple architecture—two, three, or four lined stanzas—across an expanse of un-inked openness. This span of possibility makes the cutting words that follow even more pronounced. 

In “Love Poem,” he writes:

The purpose of the eye is to narrow

The world beyond the body

To a receptive point into the body

The repetition of “the body,” and the angling of view from an infinite space to a deeply internal one, replicates what the poems in this collection do to and for the reader.

Miller also depicts America—and its people—by what it is and what it isn’t. We’re a navel-gazing bunch, now in our late adolescence, still trying to determine who and what we’ll be, and we are prone to ignore what lies beyond our geographic, and individual borders, as in “Stages on a Journey Westward”:

Here in America 

we are engines 

drowning out what lies 

beyond our interiors.

Miller’s view is historic, expansive, and philosophical, incorporating political and world events, but always with an experience of his—and our—individual engagement and complicity. He is especially expert in overlaying acts from the past and present and indicating the threat of future repetition. One of the longer pieces in the collection, “On Progress,” starts with the narrator’s grandmother’s attendance at the last public hanging in US history in 1936:

The condemned man 

Looking out on the crowd before him

must feel that every person there has become

inhuman. Why won’t they rush forward

to save him? Impossible

this doesn’t happen. . .

Miller is interested in the most difficult questions, in holding an unflinching, if linguistically thrilling, mirror to our uncivilized selves. Do we not still conduct horrific public killings that are echoes of our brutal past? Then go back to our lives unaffected, with a portion of that inhumanity now permanently entwined in our DNA? 

The crowd gathered for the killing 

couldn’t be more human; the condemned 

is just no longer among them.

We may not be responsible for the sins of the past, but we are responsible for those we bequeath to our progeny, through blind ignorance or willful denial. 

In the penultimate poem, “At Today’s Auschwitz,”, the speaker imagines the mundane daily activities that maintain a monument to unimaginable horror, the worst of what mankind was, is, and will continue to be, in contrast with the safety of the curator’s regular life. In a sense, we are all charged to acknowledge the crimes against individuals, against humanity, to keep them visible, especially if we are to live in the comfort that some of us are privileged to experience. In a time of great societal conflict, this serves as both a meaningful reminder as well as a warning of what may again—still—be unleashed.

The title of the collection offers both specificity and openness, and is emblematic of the dualities and contradictions within. A jury is a critical element of American justice, yet many horrific acts have been done—continue to be done—in the name of such justice, here and abroad. The “we” suggests a community, a collaboration, but also speaks to the mob and the hive mind. Such dichotomies exist on every page of this book, which cause one to reflect on one’s own complicities and shadows of the soul. Miller fillets allegories and metaphors to the bone; even when there are repetitions of words, they are sonically and thematically important to the final product.

Beyond the universal aspects of humankind that Miller explores so deeply and memorably, there are many moments of essential humanness that shine. In the six short lines of “Notes: History,” the poet incorporates the past, present, and future, and the power of ink on a page. He renders the intimate contract between writer and reader, how we interact across a page, and have an enduring relationship without ever meeting:

I’m saying this 

from inside your mind, 

having carried 

myself into 

through the dust 

of the Roman alphabet.

It is equally masterful that these three couplets could as easily—and as meaningfully—render the simple magic and beauty of our personal relationships, how we connect, through intent and the decision to carry ourselves into the orbits of those we choose to love. The themes may be large and thus at times intrinsically unanswerable, but the language, and the intent, is deeply intimate, human, and humane.

It’s especially striking to read these poems now, because they feel perfectly suited for our fractured times, but a collection this assured, this perfectly rendered, will remain fresh and equally resonant for future readers. Whether it’s war or love or grief, Miller reflects the switchbacks and circularity of time and history. “Armistice” starts with “The war stopped precisely / where it was” and ends with the sight of children who:

began climbing the ladders 

of bombs hanging from the sky—

and when the most daring of them 

reached the bays to clamber 

finally into the cockpits, the war 

snapped back into motion.

There is no ending, only perpetuity, whether it’s war or love or grief. The last poem of the collection, “The Humanist” explores the light and darkness of our civilization, as well as language’s inability to express all that contains it, and us. In its final lines:

The loneliest person on earth 

is a humanist condemned.  When the pyre 

was lit, it bloated the square 

with light—the light his body fed. 

Later the guards cleaned up in darkness.

We have no record of what they said.

Yet poetry often offers us light that reaches to the past and extends beyond the darkness of our times, and the judgments we make and are made against us. When poetry is exceptional, as it is in Wayne Miller’s confident, gifted hands—it also provides a record of what should be said, and recorded, and remembered.

Mandana Chaffa is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Nowruz Journal, a periodical of Persian arts and letters that will launch in spring 2021, an Assistant Managing Editor at Split/Lip Press, and a Daily Editor at Chicago Review of Books. Her essay “1,916 Days” is in My Shadow Is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora, (University of Texas Press, 2020) and she edited Roshi Rouzbehani’s limited-edition illustrated biography collection, 50 Inspiring Iranian Women (2020). Her writing has also appeared or is forthcoming in The Ploughshares Blog, Chicago Review of Books, The Rumpus, Split Lip Magazine, Asymptote, Jacket2, Rain Taxi, The Adroit Journal and elsewhere. Born in Tehran, Iran, she lives in New York.