The richness and heft that is lost in the making of official accounts of the world is one of Miller’s favorite themes. Another of his poems speculates that a law the British Empire established on how to handle mermaids (in essence: turn them into colonial subjects) led the marvellous creatures to withdraw from all further contact with the human race. In his novel “Augustown” (Pantheon), his third, a canny old blind woman named Ma Taffy tells her grandnephew Kaia the story of Alexander Bedward, a Baptist preacher in the parish of St. Andrew, outside Kingston. As history would have it, in 1920 a large assembly of Bedward’s followers gathered to see him fulfill his promise to fly up to Heaven. Instead, he was committed to a lunatic asylum, and became immortalized in a ditty sung by the novel’s schoolchildren: “Bedward jump, and Bedward bruck him neck!” In “Augustown,” however, Bedward the flying preacher, buoyed up by the faith of his congregation, really can fly, and, tethered by a team of deacons, he enters his church bobbing like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. Ma Taffy can swear to this, because when she was a girl she saw this feat with her own eyes.

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