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

WIL MILLS, the son of agricultural missionaries, grew up in Brazil and Louisiana. After earning his BA and MA in theology from the University of the South, he worked at a variety of jobs, including carpenter, sawmill operator, and baker. He also served as the Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and as the Writer-in-Residence at Covenant College in Chattanooga. His poetry was published in Poetry, The New Republic, The Hudson Review, The New Criterion, and many other journals, and his debut collection, Light for the Orphans, was published in 2002. Until his death in 2011, he lived in Tennessee with his wife Kathryn and their two children, Benjamin and Phoebe-Agnès, first in a house that he built himself in Sewanee, then, later, in Chattanooga.