About

The voices in Patricia Cleary Miller’s Warmer Than Yesterday: New and Selected Poems struggle with four of life’s greatest confusions: home, war, death, and love. With humor, pathos, and ambiguity—after all, today is warmer than yesterday—they savor their experiences even if they never seem to find out all the answers as they search in Kansas City and all over the world. As Miller writes, “The characters in this collection are confused; they can’t get it right. Mothers and children, lovers, soldiers: guardedly optimistic, because today is warmer than yesterday, they struggle with the ambiguity of love, death, regret. But the book is not a downer: there are still yellow roses, mermaids, and a bit of tra-la-la in the forest.” This book highlights poems from her numerous books spanning over thirty years.

Author

Patricia Cleary Miller is a professor emerita of English at Rockhurst University, where she founded and edited the Rockhurst Review. At Rockhurst, she served variously on the executive committee of the faculty general assembly and as chair of the Department of English and of the Humanities Division. Her first collection of poetry, Starting a Swan Dive, won Rockhurst’s Daniel E. Brenner Award for Scholarly Achievement. Her collection Can You Smell the Rain? won the James McKenna Award from the Gerard Manley Hopkins Society and International Festival; the poem “Mother Won’t Buy Polypropylene” won a Pushcart Prize. Her nonfiction Westport: Missouri’s Port of Many Returns celebrated the sesquicentennial of the town that would become Kansas City. Her chapbook Dresden gave a child’s actual view of the Allied bombing.

Her secondary school was the French Convent of Notre Dame de Sion. She holds degrees from Radcliffe College, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the University of Kansas. She held a postdoctoral fellowship in poetry at Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute. Her collections The Maori Never Age and its second edition Crimson Lights include poems celebrating her eight years as poet laureate of Harvard University’s alumni association. She is a founding board member of The Writer’s Place; she served as president and won its Muse Award.

Praise

“In Patricia Cleary Miller fashion, details and description pull readers into the scenes of Warmer Than Yesterday, make us part of the story, and take us to Iraq, Moscow, Vancouver, the Congo, Mount Everest, Rome, Kansas and elsewhere. Whether during war, a ceremony, or out for a night on the town, these characters endure, and some escape with mischief, especially Mother, the most endearing of Miller’s persona characters. Whether she’s scrubbing floors to tighten her thighs, pressing corsages from her many beaus into books, refusing to wear sensible shoes or ski parkas, festooning herself in fur and lamé, or turning off lights to ‘get the light bill under control,’ Mother is fun and charming. With such a wide array of places, people, and situations, there is something engaging for everyone in Warmer Than Yesterday.”
—Maryfrances Wagner, Missouri 6th Poet Laureate, Solving for X and Red Silk

“Reading Warmer Than Yesterday is, today, better than yesterday’s reading, and tomorrow’s will be better yet than today’s. The transparency of these poems at first beguiles: arresting, sensuous, precise language. Then the veils, the revelations, and mysteries, emerge—they were there all the time. These are poems to return to.”
—James Engell, Harvard University

“The great Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh, once wrote,

What wisdom’s ours
If such there be
Is a flavour of personality.

I agree and always look for it in a poetry collection. Warmer Than Yesterday certainly passes the test with flying colours. It is full of the personality of Patricia Cleary Miller: generous, witty, engaged, cosmopolitan, female and, most important of all, compassionate.”
—Desmond Egan, from the foreword