This Basilica is a Temple of Poetry

(Note: This week marks the beginning of a series on what New Bay Books authors are up to this summer. We can report that George Miller has been, as they say, getting it done.)

The word basilica derives from ancient Roman architecture describing a church or large building. It is an apt title for the breadth of verse in Basilica, a newly published graphic anthology of poetry by southern Maryland writer George Miller.

The 66-page book, 8.5x11 and suitable for the coffee table, is illustrated in stunning fashion by Donald Shomette, author, maritime expert and graphic designer, also of southern Maryland. The book is published under the imprint Millstone Publishing. It is available at Amazon, Thriftbooks and other online outlets.

Basilica exudes the wry humor and worldliness found in other of Miller’s works, including Loaded for Bear, a short story collection published by New Bay Books.

Miller has been a prolific writer after a career associated with the FDIC and Lockheed Martin, and later as CEO of a computer software company. Other of his publications include The Best Free Verse Ten Dollars Can Buy, a poetry collection, and Cooper Finds Her Thermal, an illustrated allegory.

Like many southern Maryland writers, George Miller operated in the orbit of Elisavietta Ritchie, the teacher, editor and czarina of Maryland poetry, who died last year at age 92. Miller recalled that Ritchie, a world traveler who published more than 20 volumes of poetry, encouraged him to produce an anthology of southern Maryland poems.

Miller had collaborated often with Shomette, whose talents include a gift for photographic interpretation, and Miller had the goods — a slew of unpublished verse along with poems that had seen the light of day or won a prize.

“It just kind of grew,” Miller said of the project.

Basilica melds words with design in memorable fashion. The book is divided into six sections, beginning in the Baltimore Basilica, where a mother and son seek respite from the Vietnam war, to a tongue-in-cheek finale, called Palm Beach Blessing which, alongside a half-page profile photo of Miller. includes the lines.

May your estate planner bury ill-gotten assets in a multigenerational family trust,

And:

May your wife’s career not outshine your own.

No less than St. Augustine provides a foreword to Basilica with a perception of life that might send one to a quiet room to ponder. St. Augustine posits that three times coexist in the soul: “a time present of things past; a time present of things present; and a time present of things future.”

A basilica is both an organizing tool and a thematic device in Basilica. Other graphics were born of Miller’s photos from the Saint Nicholas Basilica, in Myra, Turkey, and the Basilica of St. John in the Turkish city of Ephesus.

Paintings by Miller’s aunt, June Ciancio, illustrate several poems, including Post Mortem, which begins:

Sunday morning, breakfast at the kitchen table

My mother’s hand on mine.

“Grandad’s gone,

You have to let him go"

Miller was an army officer in Vietnam, an experience that shows up in his work, including in the poem Staff Sergeant Billotte Checks Out:

“Ia Drang Valley, Vietnam, 1967—

A sentry in the crosshairs, a sniper on the bluff,

Yet another vigil on yet another parapet,

A bridge above the Ia Drang;

A silent shot across the water,

A  body limp along the levee.

Miller's work also celebrates Chesapeake country, as in the poem Flat Bottoms, God Bless’Em, that won First Place in a New Bay Books Nautical Poem Contest in 2022.

My brother;

Hand on the tiller, eyes on the river,

Threads his skiff through blue-gray sandbars…

Lord of brackish waters,

Jellyfish, snapping turtles, muskrats

By the Mercies of the River,

May his catch be bountiful,

His channel wide,

His keel steady.