<p>Carolyn Miller is a lyric poet of redeeming grace and intense clarity. Her poems are grounded in a sense of the marvelous, as if viewing life through a jewel, transforming the dark world of memory and desire into a luminous presence. She is a master of distilled moments. The mood of the poems in <em>Route 66 and Its Sorrows</em> is both elegiac and celebratory. She returns us to what is nurturing in our lives and in the world: &ldquo;everywhere / cicadas and crickets are rasping out their brief sentient lives, / and off in the woods a whippoorwill keeps calling / that each moment is sweeter and more precious / than any you will ever taste again.&rdquo; I read her poems with admiration and deep pleasure.<em>&mdash;</em>Joseph Stroud</p>