HOW WE SLEEP ON THE NIGHTS
WE DON'T MAKE LOVE
By E. Ethelbert Miller
Curbstone. 73 pp. Paperback, $12.95
M - A - C - N - O - L - I - A
By A. Van Jordan
Norton. 134 pp. $23.95
"The streets widened and the books got thinner." That is how poet Ece Ayhan described his countryman Orhan Veli's impact on Turkish poetry and consciousness. It also captures a paradoxical less-is-much-more magic at the heart of poetry itself. This magic is powerfully at work in How We Sleep on the Nights We Don't Make Love, E. Ethelbert Miller's most recent collection.
Some of Miller's poems even evoke the casual, abrupt, off-handed banter that Orhan Veli used to transform Turkish literature. But while Veli wrote his miniatures about headaches, pigeons and the urge to ramble, when Miller strips his verse bare, he also sheds his clothes and those of his beloved. Contrary to the sentiment expressed in its unforgettable title, How We Sleep on the Nights We Don't Make Love is irresistibly sexy. Consider "Toothpaste," all nine lines and 29 words of it:
after dinner
you have the habit
of curling up in
the couch
like a tube of
