Since the death of his wife Dodo (the philosopher Doreen Maitre) in 2022, much of David Miller’s work has been an elegiac exploration of grief. Late Inscriptions continues this theme and phase in his poetry as Miller recounts and reimagines, remembers and re-members in his attempt to commune with the dead and navigate grief.He writes in the minimalist style derived from the great US poet and mystic Robert Lax. Keith Jebb has noted that Miller admires Lax immensely and says that ‘few have pitched words in space, found the pitch of words, like Miller and Lax.’ When I interviewed him in 2023, Miller said that Lax was exemplary for him, both as a writer and as a person, and emphasised the ‘strong, even severe strand of minimalism in a good deal of his work’. What this means in practice is that each word used is significant because each word bears meaning. Miller leans on and stresses each word because they bear the weight of sorrow. Jebb says that Miller creates ‘with a balance of minimalism, repetition and the abstract, words isolated and ringing.’A similar minimalism is also to be found in the content of these poems. In the words of the Del Amitri song, in these poems ‘nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all’. Harriet Neville notes the happenings as being: a bird landing on the door, waiting to be fed; a dog entering the bedroom through an open back door; and Belgian waffles and eggs Florentine shared with old friends. Although nothing significant seems to happen, actually everything happens and we, as is the poet, are changed.It is not just words that become significant in poetry and grief but also events and activities of any kind, whatever they may be. Each and every event is a potential trigger for emotion or memories and a potential healing agent enabling the one grieving to cope in the face of loss. Attention is paid to each event or activity and is rewarded as all are meaning-full.Addressing simultaneously both ourselves as reader and Dodo, his late wife, Miller moves seamlessly between event and memory, action and reflection in his sharing of his grief journey. While inscriptions are usually permanent markers of significance, these inscriptions shift and change in the moment, as minute by minute, page by page, we move beyond them. What counts, as Neville identifies, is the activity of recounting and reflecting:
To speak –
to not speak –
to write –
through – and out
With the simplest of elements sparely rendered, Miller tenderly explores the paradox of love and loss by weaving together fragmented memories ‘coloured by grief’. As Jebb comments, ‘No other contemporary poet does this so skilfully, or with such honesty.’
Jonathan Evens 23rd August 2026
