Poetry review – HERE & THEREAFTER: Lucy Winrow admires a poetic exploration of family history by Alice Miller
Here & Thereafter
Alice Miller
Liverpool University Press
ISBN 978-1-80596-616-6
pp70 £10.99
In Alice Miller’s fourth collection, Here & Thereafter, she explores the histories embedded in places, bodies and families, and how the present can suddenly become charged with the past. The title itself suggests this entanglement: ‘here’ is contained within ‘thereafter’, as though the present is already held inside what comes next, while remaining inseparable from what has come before.
Miller writes as a new mother in contemporary Berlin, reflecting on the life of her German-Jewish grandmother. The collection ranges widely between motherhood and identity, war and technology, the natural world and the act of writing.
The collection’s six sections trace an apparently forward movement: Home Page [Go Back], Berlin, Find the Beginning, The Golden Bough Hotel, To Stumble Where We’ve Never Seen, and Never After. But these titles complicate that trajectory. The first instructs us to go back; the third asks us to find a beginning; the last denies the possibility of a conventional ‘after’. From the outset, Miller suggests that moving forward may require us to keep looking backwards.
“Europe and After, 1933–2024” is dedicated to Miller’s grandmother, Anna. It moves between her flight from Germany and the speaker’s life in contemporary Berlin, collapsing the distance between past and present.
At seventeen, Anna leaves Germany in 1933: ‘So she goes by ship alone, / arrives alone – in crowds and rain – in London.’ The juxtaposition of ‘alone’ and ‘in crowds’ emphasises her isolation. Little more than a child herself, she must now care for two infants. Her precarious position as an ‘enemy alien’ contrasts with her role as an au pair to babies with ‘soft-skinned ignorance of history’. Her loneliness is compounded by the lack of reliable news and a language barrier: ‘The more English / she learns, the worse the Germans sound’. Yet the poem is careful about the limits of what historical information can tell us: ‘How lonely is she? That’s not recorded.’ Records can preserve events and names, but not the experience of living through them.
The sequence continues to chart Anna’s life as she marries Jim, ‘a man so far her senior he had once / married (then divorced) her aunt’, and starts a family. Any sense of stability is short-lived in the half-bombed Knightsbridge home where they live as part of Jim’s caretaking work: ‘a pretend existence, above a pretty square. / But all the railings have been melted down / for shot to kill the Germans at the front.’ The war reshapes not only lives but the physical places they inhabit. The family moves from London to Norfolk Island and finally Auckland, New Zealand, where history still leaves its mark: ‘The daughter’s ashamed of their accents.’
It is only later that Anna learns that the father of the twins she cared for was working on the atomic bomb, ‘the greatest ever tool of unmaking’. Anna even feels implicated: ‘She helped / to make it too, she sees, by holding his boys’. Creation and destruction become unexpectedly entangled, linking Anna’s small acts of care to the history that follows.
In the sequence’s final poem, “Whatever is the Opposite of Escape (Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington to Berlin)”, the title suggests that there can be no true escape: leaving does not leave the past behind. In contemporary Berlin, the speaker is pregnant: ‘It is the month before my son is born / that another European war breaks out’. The past rushes into the present, as the speaker thinks of Anna not simply in terms of where she was ‘from’, but of ‘how that must have filtered through / the world she saw, and how we carry all / the news we hear’. The word ‘carry’ is crucial. History is not something safely behind us but something absorbed into bodies, places, languages and ways of seeing.
While Anna’s generation experienced war through newspapers, letters and official records, today we experience conflict through an overwhelming and continuous stream of images and commentary. In “The War News (London)”, language is a barrier for Anna: ‘Unfortunately and fortunately the news / for her is still unreadable’. Instead, she dreams that the English papers contain good news about her family’s fate.
In the present-day poem “Oslo”, the repetition feels relentless: ‘The newspapers say and the newspapers say / and the screens say too and remain unfrayed.’ The media seem indefatigable, endlessly repeating the news, while those on the receiving end can only absorb its cumulative strain.
“Winter and a Military” explores what happens when endless information fuels speculation and discussion about the possibility of Russia invading Ukraine:
Wasn’t it strange when the man parked
all his tanks on the border of the neighbouring country
and we all discussed whether or not
he would invade?
The speaker later admits, ‘our talk was interesting: war / no war? Will he, won’t he? / It became a sort of game’. The language of entertainment is uncomfortable, but the poem does not suggest indifference. Endless discussion can also be understood as an anxious attempt to make an incomprehensible situation feel more controllable. Yet a proliferation of voices produces not clarity but a form of silence: in “What We Want to Tell You”, ‘The more people / talk the quieter it gets / out here.’
From individual attempts to make sense of events, Miller turns to the wider structures in which those events unfold. “The Golden Bough Hotel” is a striking extended metaphor that imagines society as a hotel with different floors containing different sections of humanity, exposing the fragmentation and hypocrisy behind an apparently functioning whole:
The upstairs ballroom holds twelve
aspiring rulers, each powerfully saying one thing
we know means another, each slouching
towards the golden bough for their next
announcement, while grasping in the other fist,
atrocities new.
Their slouching postures suggest complacency and arrogance, grotesquely at odds with vast
acts of violence – reduced to something small and insignificant that fits into one hand. Ominously, these are just the ‘next’ atrocities, hinting at an endless supply of suffering. ‘Aspiring rulers’ is revealing: already occupying positions of power, they remain driven by a desire for more of it. Life on the floors below exposes the consequences of their leadership.
Unlike the implied luxury of the ballroom, the wallpaper on the middle floors has been ‘scribbled on by every writer / who thought they had something to say about the time’. The hotel’s library has been looted and ‘The older works have gone, possibly burned for / heat in the drained years’. Survival has taken precedence over preserving knowledge and culture. A different kind of mismanagement appears in the eighth-floor conference room – ironically a space for collaboration and problem-solving – which now ‘holds the imperfect technologies / we developed to fight’ a pandemic.
The basement and first floor belong to ‘the poor’ who maintain the hotel: ‘emptying the pipes of the hotel / and washing the sheets in once-silver tubs / and receiving the forever food as it is delivered’. The ‘once-silver tubs’ hint at a more prosperous past, while the dystopian-sounding ‘forever food’ is what passes for nourishment.
Given their vital role in keeping things going, ‘the poor’ are largely ignored: ‘When we do scrawl on the walls down here, / no one upstairs will read what we write.’ The shift to the first-person plural draws the reader into the hotel, making us part of the system it describes. At times, their frustration spills over into violence:
Occasionally the poor rise up to kill
some of the people upstairs, and for a while
the hallways run with blood,
but no one ever really dies in this hotel.
We have no graveyard; we’ve seen no bones.
In these startling lines, acts of violence are absorbed rather than resolved, their consequences apparently erased. This heightens their helplessness: no action, however extreme, seems capable of destabilising the hierarchical structure. By the final stanza, time itself becomes unstable: ‘It is nearly the end of one century, it is nearly the middle / of another, any day everything might start again.’ The speaker then turns to the reader in one of the collection’s most impactful examples of direct address: ‘Is it your time to sit / on the golden bough? / What sort of song will you sing?’ We are asked what we will do with what we inherit, our knowledge, and the words available to us.
What, then, can those words do? Miller does not pretend that poems can repair what they describe. “Gaza” begins, ‘Haven’t fixed you, poem. / Because the war was so – / because it and this is unfixable.’ The broken syntax reflects the inadequacy of language. Yet “Old Romantic” reaches a similar conclusion without abandoning poetry:
When we’re young we know that poems matter, later we
still know but have to admit there’s no way they can.
After all, much more than sandcastles are vanishing.
With these odds, one part must keep singing
and it’s that proof we keep.
The apparent contradiction is important: what changes with age is not the conviction that poems matter, but an understanding of what they can actually do. The knowledge that ‘much more than sandcastles are vanishing’ makes poetry’s limitations impossible to ignore, yet the speaker insists that ‘we still know’. Faith in poetry survives, but in a chastened form: not as a means of changing what has happened, but as a way of finding meaning in what remains.
Miller repeatedly returns to small, easily overlooked details: a crow wiping its beak on snow or ‘mould-stipple’ on a ceiling. This tension between futility and attention recurs in “Torn and Strewn”, where the speaker questions the impulse to catalogue details: ‘when poems list / these sorts of details, trying to outrun / thought, I think, this game’s flawed’, before conceding, ‘but still, it’s one of the few things I love.’ The payoff of this approach appears in the poem’s final lines:
OK, it’s usually not so
lovely, and sure, we often forget
to look, but one day maybe
we’ll be in every raindrop falling and
every grain of soil, sucking them up.
Here, the boundaries between the observer and the observed begin to dissolve: we are imagined not simply as looking at the natural world, but as becoming both what falls and what receives it. The image suggests transformation rather than disappearance, another version of the collection’s refusal of a clean ‘after’.
Throughout Here & Thereafter, nothing remains entirely finished. “Unpromised Lands” captures its theme of continuous becoming: ‘we’re always being / made while making’ with ‘our hands shining clammy with yesterday’s clay’. The past continues to shape us, even as we shape what comes next. What may feel lonely or transient in the present becomes part of a continuity in which the past remains with us and reaches into what comes next. The poems do not present this as an answer to loss, but they may offer a consoling way of seeing it.
Sep 28 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Alice Miller
Poetry review – HERE & THEREAFTER: Lucy Winrow admires a poetic exploration of family history by Alice Miller
Here & Thereafter
Alice Miller
Liverpool University Press
ISBN 978-1-80596-616-6
pp70 £10.99
In Alice Miller’s fourth collection, Here & Thereafter, she explores the histories embedded in places, bodies and families, and how the present can suddenly become charged with the past. The title itself suggests this entanglement: ‘here’ is contained within ‘thereafter’, as though the present is already held inside what comes next, while remaining inseparable from what has come before.
Miller writes as a new mother in contemporary Berlin, reflecting on the life of her German-Jewish grandmother. The collection ranges widely between motherhood and identity, war and technology, the natural world and the act of writing.
The collection’s six sections trace an apparently forward movement: Home Page [Go Back], Berlin, Find the Beginning, The Golden Bough Hotel, To Stumble Where We’ve Never Seen, and Never After. But these titles complicate that trajectory. The first instructs us to go back; the third asks us to find a beginning; the last denies the possibility of a conventional ‘after’. From the outset, Miller suggests that moving forward may require us to keep looking backwards.
“Europe and After, 1933–2024” is dedicated to Miller’s grandmother, Anna. It moves between her flight from Germany and the speaker’s life in contemporary Berlin, collapsing the distance between past and present.
At seventeen, Anna leaves Germany in 1933: ‘So she goes by ship alone, / arrives alone – in crowds and rain – in London.’ The juxtaposition of ‘alone’ and ‘in crowds’ emphasises her isolation. Little more than a child herself, she must now care for two infants. Her precarious position as an ‘enemy alien’ contrasts with her role as an au pair to babies with ‘soft-skinned ignorance of history’. Her loneliness is compounded by the lack of reliable news and a language barrier: ‘The more English / she learns, the worse the Germans sound’. Yet the poem is careful about the limits of what historical information can tell us: ‘How lonely is she? That’s not recorded.’ Records can preserve events and names, but not the experience of living through them.
The sequence continues to chart Anna’s life as she marries Jim, ‘a man so far her senior he had once / married (then divorced) her aunt’, and starts a family. Any sense of stability is short-lived in the half-bombed Knightsbridge home where they live as part of Jim’s caretaking work: ‘a pretend existence, above a pretty square. / But all the railings have been melted down / for shot to kill the Germans at the front.’ The war reshapes not only lives but the physical places they inhabit. The family moves from London to Norfolk Island and finally Auckland, New Zealand, where history still leaves its mark: ‘The daughter’s ashamed of their accents.’
It is only later that Anna learns that the father of the twins she cared for was working on the atomic bomb, ‘the greatest ever tool of unmaking’. Anna even feels implicated: ‘She helped / to make it too, she sees, by holding his boys’. Creation and destruction become unexpectedly entangled, linking Anna’s small acts of care to the history that follows.
In the sequence’s final poem, “Whatever is the Opposite of Escape (Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington to Berlin)”, the title suggests that there can be no true escape: leaving does not leave the past behind. In contemporary Berlin, the speaker is pregnant: ‘It is the month before my son is born / that another European war breaks out’. The past rushes into the present, as the speaker thinks of Anna not simply in terms of where she was ‘from’, but of ‘how that must have filtered through / the world she saw, and how we carry all / the news we hear’. The word ‘carry’ is crucial. History is not something safely behind us but something absorbed into bodies, places, languages and ways of seeing.
While Anna’s generation experienced war through newspapers, letters and official records, today we experience conflict through an overwhelming and continuous stream of images and commentary. In “The War News (London)”, language is a barrier for Anna: ‘Unfortunately and fortunately the news / for her is still unreadable’. Instead, she dreams that the English papers contain good news about her family’s fate.
In the present-day poem “Oslo”, the repetition feels relentless: ‘The newspapers say and the newspapers say / and the screens say too and remain unfrayed.’ The media seem indefatigable, endlessly repeating the news, while those on the receiving end can only absorb its cumulative strain.
“Winter and a Military” explores what happens when endless information fuels speculation and discussion about the possibility of Russia invading Ukraine:
Wasn’t it strange when the man parked
all his tanks on the border of the neighbouring country
and we all discussed whether or not
he would invade?
The speaker later admits, ‘our talk was interesting: war / no war? Will he, won’t he? / It became a sort of game’. The language of entertainment is uncomfortable, but the poem does not suggest indifference. Endless discussion can also be understood as an anxious attempt to make an incomprehensible situation feel more controllable. Yet a proliferation of voices produces not clarity but a form of silence: in “What We Want to Tell You”, ‘The more people / talk the quieter it gets / out here.’
From individual attempts to make sense of events, Miller turns to the wider structures in which those events unfold. “The Golden Bough Hotel” is a striking extended metaphor that imagines society as a hotel with different floors containing different sections of humanity, exposing the fragmentation and hypocrisy behind an apparently functioning whole:
The upstairs ballroom holds twelve
aspiring rulers, each powerfully saying one thing
we know means another, each slouching
towards the golden bough for their next
announcement, while grasping in the other fist,
atrocities new.
Their slouching postures suggest complacency and arrogance, grotesquely at odds with vast
acts of violence – reduced to something small and insignificant that fits into one hand. Ominously, these are just the ‘next’ atrocities, hinting at an endless supply of suffering. ‘Aspiring rulers’ is revealing: already occupying positions of power, they remain driven by a desire for more of it. Life on the floors below exposes the consequences of their leadership.
Unlike the implied luxury of the ballroom, the wallpaper on the middle floors has been ‘scribbled on by every writer / who thought they had something to say about the time’. The hotel’s library has been looted and ‘The older works have gone, possibly burned for / heat in the drained years’. Survival has taken precedence over preserving knowledge and culture. A different kind of mismanagement appears in the eighth-floor conference room – ironically a space for collaboration and problem-solving – which now ‘holds the imperfect technologies / we developed to fight’ a pandemic.
The basement and first floor belong to ‘the poor’ who maintain the hotel: ‘emptying the pipes of the hotel / and washing the sheets in once-silver tubs / and receiving the forever food as it is delivered’. The ‘once-silver tubs’ hint at a more prosperous past, while the dystopian-sounding ‘forever food’ is what passes for nourishment.
Given their vital role in keeping things going, ‘the poor’ are largely ignored: ‘When we do scrawl on the walls down here, / no one upstairs will read what we write.’ The shift to the first-person plural draws the reader into the hotel, making us part of the system it describes. At times, their frustration spills over into violence:
Occasionally the poor rise up to kill
some of the people upstairs, and for a while
the hallways run with blood,
but no one ever really dies in this hotel.
We have no graveyard; we’ve seen no bones.
In these startling lines, acts of violence are absorbed rather than resolved, their consequences apparently erased. This heightens their helplessness: no action, however extreme, seems capable of destabilising the hierarchical structure. By the final stanza, time itself becomes unstable: ‘It is nearly the end of one century, it is nearly the middle / of another, any day everything might start again.’ The speaker then turns to the reader in one of the collection’s most impactful examples of direct address: ‘Is it your time to sit / on the golden bough? / What sort of song will you sing?’ We are asked what we will do with what we inherit, our knowledge, and the words available to us.
What, then, can those words do? Miller does not pretend that poems can repair what they describe. “Gaza” begins, ‘Haven’t fixed you, poem. / Because the war was so – / because it and this is unfixable.’ The broken syntax reflects the inadequacy of language. Yet “Old Romantic” reaches a similar conclusion without abandoning poetry:
When we’re young we know that poems matter, later we
still know but have to admit there’s no way they can.
After all, much more than sandcastles are vanishing.
With these odds, one part must keep singing
and it’s that proof we keep.
The apparent contradiction is important: what changes with age is not the conviction that poems matter, but an understanding of what they can actually do. The knowledge that ‘much more than sandcastles are vanishing’ makes poetry’s limitations impossible to ignore, yet the speaker insists that ‘we still know’. Faith in poetry survives, but in a chastened form: not as a means of changing what has happened, but as a way of finding meaning in what remains.
Miller repeatedly returns to small, easily overlooked details: a crow wiping its beak on snow or ‘mould-stipple’ on a ceiling. This tension between futility and attention recurs in “Torn and Strewn”, where the speaker questions the impulse to catalogue details: ‘when poems list / these sorts of details, trying to outrun / thought, I think, this game’s flawed’, before conceding, ‘but still, it’s one of the few things I love.’ The payoff of this approach appears in the poem’s final lines:
OK, it’s usually not so
lovely, and sure, we often forget
to look, but one day maybe
we’ll be in every raindrop falling and
every grain of soil, sucking them up.
Here, the boundaries between the observer and the observed begin to dissolve: we are imagined not simply as looking at the natural world, but as becoming both what falls and what receives it. The image suggests transformation rather than disappearance, another version of the collection’s refusal of a clean ‘after’.
Throughout Here & Thereafter, nothing remains entirely finished. “Unpromised Lands” captures its theme of continuous becoming: ‘we’re always being / made while making’ with ‘our hands shining clammy with yesterday’s clay’. The past continues to shape us, even as we shape what comes next. What may feel lonely or transient in the present becomes part of a continuity in which the past remains with us and reaches into what comes next. The poems do not present this as an answer to loss, but they may offer a consoling way of seeing it.