Tender the River

by Matt W. Miller 

Texas A&M University Press  $19.95 

Reviewed by Glen Young

Matt W. Miller’s recent collection Tender the River courses from lament to ode, then love letter and more, all the while carrying readers through a poetic navigation of the Merrimack River.

Miller’s observations are sometimes personal, sometimes universal. A Lowell, Massachusetts native, Miller comes by all his observations honestly, as the river carves banks through Lowell, long littered with broken-down factories and the ghosts of industry, as well as the opioid epidemic. Miller, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, teaches at New Hampshire’s Phillips Exeter Academy, still in the shadow of the river’s reach. 

It is not only the major moments that Miller examines with clarity, but as well the quotidian quiet that etches the lives of the river’s inhabitants. 

“Real Life” opens by acknowledging Mark Wahlberg’s portrayal of Lowell native and boxer Micky Ward.  “Hollywood had come to us to find a hero” (17), Miller explains. Later he illustrates how the unsolicited attention of others makes us yearn for more, when he writes “maybe everything has to do with the movies” because we are always “hoping someone will see we are more than our falling action” (29-32).  So much of what Miller does well is part of this falling action.

He wanders wider too, fully aware of the river’s—and Lowell’s—place in American industry. “A Brief History of Labor” deftly turns from the working girls of the old textile looms to the disinterested ease of the mill owners. The young laborers are 

                        . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . making almost two 

                        bucks more a month up from 14.50 hell

                        that’s a 16 % raise for increasing

                        output 70% . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (10-13)

Increased production however means cutting hours, meaning less and less for the workers, while the boss can 

                        . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . still linger along 

                        the river summer evenings with his wife

                        and watch the blue herons dollar-sign their necks. (14-17)

People starve but the exploitation rolls on unabated, like the river’s currents.

Snags of every sort can plague any river, industrial or not, and Miller weaves these sometimes barely visible dangers throughout his poems, recounting the water’s history while also confronting his community’s complicity in the river’s degradation. His lines carry memory but eschew sentiment. 

In “Legend,” Miller leverages family lore about his football playing grandfather, for whom the local high school stadium is named. He cannot extricate these more personal anecdotes from the way they lend voice to the wider revelations. Miller writes:

                        And all of this gets spun

                        through jennies of local history 

                        myths carried out by sons,

                        carried into legends looing 

                        around us, measuring us

                        against our most impossible ghosts. (50-56)

The voice here is clear-eyed and exacting, if still personal. 

Miller’s most ambitious sequence comes in “River Valley Hexaemera,” a seven-part sonnet cycle, where in “Lunae” and “Lovis” and the rest, Miller explores the river’s birth and its many shapes and influences, as well as the way the water has influenced those along its banks. From “Lunae” we learn:

                         What happened was Laurentide ice ripped like lightning 

                                    dragged its ass north tearing loam from stone 

                        stitching lenticular hills of till birthing drumlin 

                                    after drumlin calving kettle ponds and vining 

                        eskers across the earth like ‘roid-roped veins. (1-5)

“Veneris” continues the river’s industrial arc; Miller writes that after some early success at organizing labor “suddenly this town was down like so many others” (9), though residents “faintly felt by the 50s we were riding // gridiron gods Riddick and Plomaritis even some back named Kerouac” (12-13), though these brief eddies of calm only sharpen the blades of disappointment and dismay.

Tender the River is an ode and a lament, as Miller reveals the many ways the region, and its people, are shaped by the Merrimack River’s steady and sturdy currents.  

Glen Young is a teacher, writer, kayak guide, and house painter. His poetry has appeared in The Walloon Writers Review and the anthologies Beneath the Lilac Canopy and Thoreau at Mackinac. He is a founding member of the Foundation for Teaching and Learning, as well as the Little Traverse Literary Guild. He serves on the board of the Harbor Springs Festival of the Book and the Mackinac Arts Council. He divides his time between Petoskey and Mackinac Island in northern Michigan.