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Critical Praise for Alms for Oblivion: A Poem in Seven Parts

• Bryce Milligan is a contemporary Muse poet, a passionate singer of "the idol at this crossroads," and Alms for Oblivion is his Gravesian claim on our attention, his dream testament to the beloved, his meditation on doubt and certainty, time and timelessness, his mythic bid to enter the ring of fire and attain the spirit.

  — Edward Hirsch, author of How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, Wild Gratitude, For the Sleepwalkers, et al.

• Alms for Oblivion is a fluid, hypnotic meditation on the beloved, combining an ironic discourse on certainty, aging, and time with an impassioned appeal to myth as a source of greater truths. As muses go, the figure at the heart of this poem has a history to be traced back to the origins of poetry in Akaddian love lyrics and forward through the world's epic and romantic literature. Milligan's language is rich, dense, charged with the power of Eliot's Tiresias in "The Waste Land" and his more brooding voice in "The Four Quartets." Alms for Oblivion breaks new ground for the contemporary long poem, and shows us love as it evanesces into dreamworlds and underworlds of longing. An important poem.

  — Paul Christensen, author of West of the American Dream, et al.

• Alms for Oblivion is like a medieval Rajasthani miniature painting — both Miltonic in ambition and expanse, and understated and image-packed like a Japanese haiku. It is an oratorical tour-de-force: haunting, cadenced, mythic, and lyrical. This is a classic "quest poem" where the muse-poet abandons everything — intellect, practicality, passion — only to lose himself in the very same things, things that are the ultimate essentials of artistic breathing, creation, and life. Orchestral in scope and shape, Milligan's Alms for Oblivion is a little gem of an epic.

  — Sudeep Sen, author of Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems

• In Alms for Oblivion, Milligan sails ambitiously toward the realm of vision. In doing so, he accomplishes something remarkable; he finds the right lyrical voice for articulating big (and dependably engaging) ideas.

  — James Hoggard, former Poet Laureate of Texas, author of Breaking an Indelicate Statue, The Shaper Poems, et al.

• In Alms for Oblivion poet Bryce Milligen travels both ancient and modern seas, navigating by a poet's mathematics and intuition, searching for the soul's harbor. Do you wonder what keeps a man running through the bright and dim of his days, what divine muses move him through the prosaic? Reader, book passage in these lines for a majestic slide.

  — Chuck Taylor, publisher Slough Press, author of Lights of the City, Only a Poet, et al.

Reviews

• Bloomsbury ReviewSept/Oct 2004

  Embarking on an ambitious, solemn, and passionate quest into a maze of his own making, the muse-poet in Bryce Milligan's latest collection of poetry, Alms for Oblivion: A Poem in Seven Parts, enjoins the reader to "put aside the wisdom of one's own age" in our common search for truth and love. Milligan's modern muse stands at a timeless crossroads, culling the threads of poetry from our ancestral tracks made by longing goddesses and lusting impostors; his cadenced verses tempt our own journey, like the enchantress Siuri, to cast off our routine lives and embrace the immediacy of our ancient, poetic origins.

  Long meditative poems are a rare treat these days; few poets possess the wherewithal to ship off on a quest that has its roots in the pantheon of Enheduanna's Ur, or Tlazoltéotl's Aztecan empire. With Alms for Oblivion, his fifth collection of poetry, Milligan revels in the complexity of mythological incantations and demonstrates an ease for untangling the riddles of fellow muse-poets. Artist, author, singer, and longtime publisher and anthologist, Milligan is an unusually daring muse-poet for our own time, blessed with Robert Graves's sense of "her naked magnificence." In the first person narrative, Milligan's narrator declares in part 3:

  I too have walked the road to Emmaeus,
  felt a chill wind rise like a voice
  but heard no voice, though those before me
  questioned the leaves stirring upon the path
  and I would have given sight,
  reason, blood, to have heard
  a single word, to have tasted
  one drop from that grail.

  Along the well-worn paths of Inanna and Gilgamesh, Orpheus and Aeneas, the search for this grail follows the chants through the forests of Caledon and the sands

  beneath Ashurbanipal's library
  in Nineveh, among the vitrified fragments
  of humankind's memory.

  Unfurling the layers of this underworld journey in verse, Milligan has a vision that never strays far from Tecayehuatzin's admonition "that truth is, can only be xochicicuatl, floricanto, poetry." This sense of surrender to the muse abounds.

• A Poem of Contrasts and Perception

  Tertulia Magazine2003

  Review by An H. Nguyen

  In general, good poetry contains stark images and simple word use. It is written to be read aloud, rewards bibliophiles but does not punish neophytes. Poetry cannot be written by just anyone off the street. Further, not everything is poetry (I will further ponder and elaborate on this topic in later essays).

  With these criteria in mind, Alms for Oblivion (Aark Arts 2003) by Bryce Milligan is good poetry. Milligan, a modern day Renaissance man, is an author, teacher, book designer, editor, anthologist, publisher and singer/songwriter. Besides Alms, his poetry includes: Daysleepers & Other Poems (1984), Litany Sung at Hell's Gate (1990), From Inside the Tree (1990) and Working the Stone (1993).

  Alms, Milligan's fifth collection of poetry is really one epic poem in seven sections.

  In section one, the reader is introduced to Milligan's narrator —a plural "I"—who perceives and muses upon the fabric of existence and perception which forms our collective memory. The catalyst is a photograph of the narrator's father who is described as "older than I am now, older than he ever was." This male image (which I pictured as a black and white photo) and the female "she" form a universal, yet ancient, struggle/dichotomy between logic and intuition; mathematics (observation) and nature (perception); faith and proof. This dichotomy forms the central thesis of Alms and is carried forth in subsequent sections wherein Milligan posits that reality is nothing more than what he describes as ". . . perception. Constructed illusion. Both. Neither."

  In fact, an example of this constructed illusion is mathematics which Milligan describes as "objective truth." However, Milligan goes on to deconstruct this ultimate truth by equating it with human error based on his simple logic that mathematics ". . . relies upon observation which relies upon perception which is ultimately human, and to be human is to err." The syllogism is completed by the reader's natural conclusion that mathematics (the constant throughout the universe) is itself inherently fallible.

  So what is real in Milligan's world? Real is the intersection between myth and history. In Milligan's landscape myth seems like nothing more than just forgotten ancient history codified into digestible tidbits. In this context, Milligan's references to Aztec, Akkadian, Sumerian, ancient Greek, and Celtic mythologies and figures is not just an attempt to show-off his wide breadth of knowledge. Rather like the old photograph, which is the lead-off image in Alms, these mythologies serve as a catalyst for the narrator's musings and perceptions.

  Overall, Milligan's work is an example of modern poetry which uses ancient theme/myths.Alms showcases Milligan's craft and his mastery of language through the use of simple phrases and short lines to create and evoke very complex musings. Alms subtly reminds the reader to keep the senses open and the extra-senses even more open. I would recommend Alms to a reader who will read the poem more than once and aloud as this reader will be rewarded by the strength of Milligan's line and verse.

• San Antonio Express-News2003

  Review by Marian Haddad

  A musician himself, San Antonio poet Bryce Milligan seems to have inherited a portion of the musical abilities of predecessors such as Stevens and Roethke. What a joy and a reconfirmation of lyric poetry to find a contemporary poet who is clearly well-versed in formal poetics and who can adeptly weave these tenets (inner rhymes, pacing and cadences), gracefully, unpretentiously and effectively throughout a free-verse poem.

  In Alms for Oblivion, a mythic, book-length poem to be published this fall, Milligan does just this. Alms is an exploration of the reality of the muse "and the manicured miracles / of her art." Milligan points to the sureness of her existence, perhaps latent at times, but reminds us of the constant returning. She returns long after the old memories, "recalling all for me now in a scrawl / I could always decipher as easily as my own."

  Intertwined with Milligan's meditations on the muse is his attention to the motion and presentation of words, to the art of sound and sense, of sync and time, and of almost-hypnotic rhythmic tendencies. Author Ed Hirsch affirms: "Bryce Milligan is a contemporary Muse poet, a passionate singer of 'the idol at this crossroads.'"