A Book of Sounds by Billy Mills (Shearsman Books)

          ‘… the drag

         of syntax

         each wave in its place

         and its time’ (‘long poem with no name’)

It would be tempting to see this as prescriptive—the ‘right place’ and ‘right time’ for every word, the way you have to craft that, to some plan, some form, some formal arrangement. But like many metaphors in Billy Mills’s work, it unstitches the facile interpretation. ‘everything flows / that is / this fragile world’ he writes later in the same poem, reformulating Heraclitus: the flow itself is fragile, less a river, more a chalk stream. There is simplicity here, but simplicity of balance, of vulnerable, active balance, like a tightrope walker or a gymnast. This takes some doing. 

The flipside of this is resilience, decay turning into growth, as in these concluding lines from ‘Four’:

         we live in earth

         and it in us

         reconstituting

         made over

An ecological poetry, but a poetry of ecology as economy, the processes of nature: photosynthesis, mycelia, the recycling labour of worms. This is the converse of the Romantic sublime: microscopic, underground perspectives, the nature we live off, and which lives off us. But thanks to us, it is a more and more unbalanced relationship:

         that all of this

         is of our doing

         & not

         & that we are not

         all of this

         that we would be

This is from a series of poems called ‘Uncertain Songs’ which takes up about a third of the volume. The way phrase ‘all of this’ works here is characteristic of the series (and by extension the whole book), it sets up and equivalence, a balance that is off-centred, a music carefully de-tuned. It sounds a note of irony in the ambiguity, though more of sadness than of anger.

Don’t get me (or Mills) wrong here—this isn’t nature poetry as commonly understood. The natural world does not provide a menu of luminous detail, but energy of certain vectors representing processes. Mills is influenced by Chinese poetry, particularly Basho—he’s written his own version of the ‘frog’ haiku—and the essence of the haiku is the encapsulation of a process or event in nature, a vector: pond-frog-splash. As little extraneous detail as possible, don’t distract, don’t be ‘pretty’ mistaking the ornament for beauty. The beauty is in the act. The more you try and describe the thrill of a swift screaming overhead, the less swift you end up with. An act of abstracting that is not ‘abstract’, a minimising process that isn’t ‘minimalism’. I could go on….

Here’s a stanza from another short series of poems titled ‘Away’:

         bird in the air

         air on the wing

         away        away

         nothing agrees

         but the wind

The second line here may look like an inversion of the first, but it isn’t. ‘air in the bird’ would be silly, after all. ‘air on the wing’ is the mechanics of flight, what allows the first line to happen. The repetition of ‘away’ might seem redundant, but hints at an exhortation, or maybe a joyous exclamation. This is the first of three places where the title word of the series appears, and it chimes with the Heraclitan theme of this and other poems. Nothing stays or stands.

The final two lines depend upon ‘agrees’ in its pivotal role. What does the wind agree with? Itself? The bird? Is the agreement a concurrence? An equivalence? All of the above, surely. 

Billy Mills is a slippery poet. To call someone slippery is usually an insult, of course, implying duplicity, at least. But here it’s nothing but a compliment: his poetry slips—by, through, over, under—and does so with integrity, intelligence and style.

Keith Jebb 17^th May 2025