A New Collection Of Poems By Jane Miller Keeps The Cutthroat Publishing Trends At Bay. By David Scott Penn Memory At These Speeds: New and Selected Poems, by Jane Miller (Copper Canyon Press). Paper, $15. IN THE GALLERY of Southwestern poets, Jane Miller's portrait is an anomalous one. For starters, she's neither Native American nor Chicana. And unlike some of Arizona's own particular creative talents, Miller is not homegrown. Born in the creative zoo of New York City and since residing in habitats as diverse as New England, Greece, California and the Midwest, Miller's wanderlust seems to fight against the idea of her being any particular region's pet poet. Nevertheless, Jane Miller--currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona--remains one of the Southwest's most sought-after language artists. Young writers from around the country travel to Tucson with the hope of enrolling in one of her seminars or, better yet, getting her opinion on a small ream of poems furtively slipped beneath her office door. Her poetry recitations, delivered with a lapel microphone and without the distraction of podium and note shuffling, continue to be standing-room-only affairs. Thus the publication of Jane Miller's sixth collection of poetry, Memory At These Speeds, is an occasion to be celebrated as much locally as it has been throughout the world of contemporary poetry. Miller has staked out a uniquely positionless position in her field. Defying categorization as feminist, political, erotic, or philosophical, the rhapsodies that comprise Memory firmly establish her as a member of that echelon of poets--along with Carolyn Forche, Robert Hass, Jorie Graham and others--whose work continues to redefine the possibilities and potentialities of contemporary American poetry. For those (myself included) who could not fathom Miller's poetry being patchworked into a "New and Selected" volume, Memory manages to highlight many of the artistic postures and attitudes that have guided Miller's opus over the years. From the transcendental esoterica of The Greater Leisures to the funky Mediterranean romp that is Black Holes, Black Stockings (written with Olga Broumas), Miller's books have delighted readers in large part because of their distinctiveness. Such a distinctiveness, in fact, that Memory at times reads more like an anthology than a selection of poems by a single poet, especially a poet in the middle of her career. However, most of Miller's previous collections, from Many Junipers, Heartbeats (1980) to American Odalisque (1987), are already out of print. So this latest volume, published early this year, is perhaps the publishing world's answer to the abbreviated half-life of most collections of poetry. Because poetry, in the language of the marketplace, is not particularly cost-effective, more and more publishers have pulled back from printing books of new poetry. Even poets of Miller's stature have been affected. While many presses have responded to this situation by focusing on chapbook production (small volumes of less than 24 pages, often with a print run of only a few hundred) and the "quality press," other publishers encourage poets to gather their work in larger and larger amalgamations, under headings like "New and Selected." Miller's newest poems, which begin Memory, share less of the sobriety that marked her most recent previous collection, August Zero (winner of the 1996 Western States Book Award). For readers spellbound by the earthy, cosmopolitan orgy of American Odalisque and perhaps disappointed by the prosaic nature of August Zero, these newest poems propose a sort of compromise. Much of the cleverness, the hip double entendres of old ("The Negroes in the film are played by blacks," from "Sycamore Mall"), is gone. But the nimbleness of her line, the fluidity with which she shifts between the meditative, intellectual and rhapsodic remains. If there is any truth to the cliché that a poet's most important collection is her next one, then there is much to anticipate in what follows Memory. The strength in Miller's poetry as a body of work has been its ability to "transmogrify" into ever more organic, ever fresher expressions over time. What she has not lost in her move to a calmer, more meditative tone is her sense of what jazz musicians call "phrasing." Much has been made in poetry circles of late about the "death of the line," that which in itself embodies poetry's most vital characteristics of clarity, "conciseness" and compression. Too much of the good contemporary poetry out there seems content to meander through a bioregion of discontinuous images and emotions without ever stopping for a half-minute to truly render anything. Against this, Miller's latest work does not disappoint.

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