The World That Isn't There

In The World That Isn’t There, Wil Mills’ luminous posthumous collection of poems, praise and satire, prophecy and valediction turn out to share a family resemblance. This kinship isn’t merely a matter of Mills’ flawless formal control and grace. Rather, the ache, the mingled despair and hope which inflect Mills’ reading of all experience from roadside restaurants to crosswalks to birds crashing into panes of glass, suffuse every poem here; and thus these poems enable us, Mills’ beneficiaries, “to read/the symbolled wonders signaled in the world” through the poet’s eyes. Which world — the world that isn’t there or the world that is? Perhaps, the poems suggest, the two worlds are finally one.

— Rachel Hadas