Back Home Awhile - Paperback

by Diane Kistner (Editor), John N. Miller (Author)

"Home" in these poems is small-town or rural Ohio: Van Wert, the poet's birthplace to which he returns briefly en route to Granville and his undergraduate education at Denison University; then Granville and its surrounding countryside, where he lives for over four decades, at times on a small farm. Two early poems describe his homecoming to Van Wert. The following works portray not only his own experiences and their settings in Granville's Licking County, but also other inhabitants-privileged, thwarted, displaced, ill, or dying-of this Ohio heartland. The author's home, some poems show, is temporal as well as geographic: "historical," the realm of a recorded or remembered past; and "mortal," a region with raw new housing developments and ever-fewer aging, dying farms.

Author Biography

Born in Van Wert, Ohio (1933), John N. Miller grew up in Hawai'i (1937-1951), then returned to Van Wert en route to Granville, OH, where he began work for his BA at Denison University. After receiving his MA and PhD from Stanford and working for two years elsewhere, he taught literature and writing at Denison until he retired in 1997, living both in Granville and on a small farm. In 2004 he and his wife Ilse moved to a retirement community In Lexington, VA, their present home. Over the past 55 years his poems have appeared in a wide variety of journals, two chapbooks, and three full-length collections, the largest and most recent of which-In Passing-was published by Pinyon Publishing (2014).