Love has strange powers; its control is unexplainable. Love can
singe souls, lift spirits, weaken the most resistant knees with abrupt
force. Love can inflate or deflate human hearts. Indeed, love can
charge emotion into an abundance of affection. Poets have a way of
rendering a clear view of love and how it affects those people where
love harbors permanently or slips away to leave permanent scars.
E. Ethelbert Miller’s latest collection of poems, Whispers, Secrets
and Promises, explores personal relationships, therefore, the poems
embrace love. Miller writes about his subject in a straightforward way.
His mind, however, is large, and his imagery illuminates the poems.
They are universal, and they have the power to lure the reader inside
them.
The poet also writes about family, his works influenced by marriage
and fatherhood. For example, the first stanza of “When We Are Alone”
reads:
I let the children
climb into my bed. They
are afraid to sleep alone.
It is dark and they cannot
