Terry Jude Miller

A Drawn Cat's Dream Terry Jude Miller

This book, by a well-known Texas poet, has work published in numerous anthologies like The Texas Poetry Calendar, the University of Houston's Bayou Review, Houston Literary Review, Boston Literary Magazine, and the Birmingham Arts Review. His poetry books are titled: The Day I Killed Superman, What If I Find Only Moonlight? and The Butterfly Canonical. Pat Durmon, The Critic Judge for this award-winning book had this to say, "Like Keats, Terry takes part in what he writes about: the farm life, the soil, the frost. There is a strong use of senses and variety in stanzas."Dr. Robin Davidson wrote the Foreword and wrote, "The title poem, The Drawn Cat's Dream, is prompted by a pencil drawing of the poet's boyhood home hung just above his writing desk. The title operates brilliantly as metaphor to suggest the poetic imagination's movement from reverie, a landscape dreamed, to the clearly rendered images of actual fields, grasses, tallow trees and junipers, calves, barbed wire and broken fences-all the ways in which farm life infuses the poet's memory. These poems share in a quintessential humanness, as they speak to the ways in which our lives, after years away, return to childhood, "those hard and tender fields," and the transforming vision that time offers us in revisiting our earliest memories, in rediscovering our hearts, no matter our historical or cultural experience. It is in the poet's deeply personal encounter with mortality that he pledges to live in the here-and-now where there is "no past/nor future," where he can celebrate human relationship and our kinship with all living things. To live then becomes a "planting in soil made rich by sacrifice," an eternal present where we, "the children of ancient stars," may find solace.