Books by Terrance Lane Millet

Rilke's quiet poems contain exceptional pent-up energy that encompasses the immediacy, wonder, and breathlessness with which the poet experienced life. His unique, spiritual connection with the world, so easily lost in a formal or literal translation, is opened up in these fresh interpretations from Terrance Lane Millet. The English versions of Rilke's poems are very loose translations from the German. An epiphany-like view of the world and the elements in it, more than the form of the poems themselves, seems to be the essence of Rilke. The poet is laid bare, and Millet's fresh use of convention reveals Rilke's openness to the mystery of experience. The poems in this collection explore Rilke's sense that out of darkness may come light and wonder; from turbulence, peace and integration; and that understanding can come through embracing what we do not understand. A certain, indefinable something hovers just out of eyeshot, as the things we fear may be little more than unexplored aspects of ourselves.

In this playful collection of poems, translations, and conjecture, Millet investigates the connections between poems and the lives of those who write them. We see how each can express and determine the other through characters that inhabit the gulf between who they are and who they pretend to be. The characters in this book struggle on thresholds of reconciliation-with themselves, with their loved ones, and with their communities. The stories behind these poems explore the attempts of individuals to come out of the darkness in order to see and to be seen honestly, without illusion, and without fear of judgment.

Finn is a family man with a teaching career at a sleepy university in southern Ontario. Every year, he's compelled to abandon his family and spend the summer fighting fires in northern Ontario, manning the same Bell HU-1 Iroquois helicopters he flew in combat.Set against the backdrop of Lake Nipissing and the rugged taiga of the Hudson Basin, Bones in the Dam delivers a penetrating look at the struggles a Canadian veteran faces after returning from war. As a young husband and father, Finn cannot acknowledge the toll PTSD has taken on him. In fact, he misses the clamor of battle. He pines for it; he's a man torn between the needs of his family and the need to relive the trauma of war.Bones in the Dam also addresses the crisis of modern masculinity: the relationship between fathers and sons and the challenges men face getting in touch with new roles as they move from the traditional to the modern. Finn is of a generation caught between.