Miller, Ruth 1919-1969

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MILLER, Ruth 1919-1969

PERSONAL: Born 1919, in Uitenhage, Cape Province, South Africa; died from cancer June 2, 1969; married; children: a son.

CAREER: Poet, author, and playwright.

AWARDS, HONORS: Ingrid Jonker Memorial Prize, for Floating Island.

WRITINGS:

Floating Island: Poems, Human & Rousseau (Cape Town, South Africa), 1965.

Selected Poems, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1968.

Ruth Miller: Poems, Prose, Plays, edited and introduced by Lionel Abrahams, Carrefour Press (Cape Town, South Africa), 1990.

SIDELIGHTS: Although she wrote plays for radio, essays, and short stories, Ruth Miller is remembered for her bold poetry that was often antagonistic to the European way of thinking. Miller grew up in Uitenhage, South Africa, married, and then moved to Johannesburg. When her son was accidentally electrocuted at the age of fourteen, Miller stopped writing for an extended period. When she returned to writing, she produced some of her most respected work. Her first book of poetry, Floating Island, reveals an almost morbid self-consciousness in the vein of poet Sylvia Plath. Three years later in 1968, Selected Poems was published. Miller's poems are often despairing and dark, possibly brought on by her son's death, as well as her own battle with cancer.

Miller's poem "Mantis" in many ways reflects Miller's despair as she grapples with the sorrows of life. In it, she describes an encounter with a praying mantis, reflecting on the emotion of fear and the role imagination plays in it. She metaphorically describes the mantis as praying to the "god of nothingness" and the triangular head as "terrible as death." The poet describes herself as "brittle as a twig," and as "Time having squeezed the sap and wrung me dry." As the poem closes, Miller ponders if "the terrible triangle of my face" would instill fear in the mantis.

Miller died of cancer in 1969. In 1990 Lionel Abrahams gathered Miller's unpublished poems, plays for radio, a short story, and an essay and published them with her two previous books in Ruth Miller: Poems, Prose, Plays. In Current Writing, Joan Meterlerkamp wrote of Miller, "For a woman poet, at least, it may be crucial to claim links with her literary predecessors in order to grapple with some of the contradictions which press upon her now. For our generation Ruth Miller is one such literary mother."