Miller’s poetry here strikes me as cumulative as well as accumulative. Significance accrues as one reads through the collection. In this sense, her poems function somewhat like the prose in a novel of ideas, both self-reflective and outward-looking. A Palace of Pearls is comprised of thirty-four numbered poems plus a coda, that is, the numerals 1-34 function as titles. The last line of each of the numbered poems is written in capital letters. These lines in turn form, in numerical order, the lines of the final poem entitled “Coda,” a formal choice that highlights the inseparability of one poem from another.
Miller's writing is elegant, but does not grasp at the gorgeous in language; this is poetry to be felt and thought with one's eyes wide open, not poetry that makes one swoon. All to the better, since this is no romanticized retreat into what Yves Bonnefoy (writing about the French romantics) called the “pretentiousness of the me,” even though Miller doesn’t hesitate to make use of the raw material of her personal life. This is not Language poetry either, even though it is intimately about the using and uses of language and the very notion and nature of use: what is the use of poetry? what does poetry do or accomplish?, how does (or should) a poet engage notions of culpability and responsibility vis-à-vis her world, her situation? In "21" she says, “people are cut they’re frightened/ they want to know why they want to know/ where they are dying well aware/ it is not in this poem”. There is an element of reportage in A Palace of Pearls, the eye of the journalist (from the root meaning daily) issuing field reports on art, architecture, history, love, and war. Numerous themes or “subjects” weave in and out, among which are the painters Goya and Caravaggio (shadows), Andalusia, the Alhambra, the poet Lorca (it is a household employee of his family who enacts for him and his brother the tale of the Palace of Pearls), the Inquisition (and by extension, the Holocaust), the poet’s dying/ dead father, the poet’s girlfriend on a trip to Italy, Naples (Caravaggio was stranded in Naples), Pompeii and Rome, the Arizona desert, and a honeymoon in Hawaii. Even though Miller claims in "22" that “history is the last thing poems should tell/ and stories next to last so poetry is all/ a scent of berry like a splash of destiny/ which hints at the best of life and after its small/ thrill passes like a small lost civilization/ it can be solace and sadness as well . . . . the poem restores nothing,” I think that A Palace of Pearls, its art, landscapes and travel memoirs included, admirably succeeds in bearing witness. ( )

A Palace of Pearls is based upon the Middle Age Arab kingdom of Al-Andalus which was a pleasure palace/fortress ("a model for ethnic tolerance") that fell during the Spanish inquisition. Jane uses it as a political and aesthetic architecture in order to investigate our current political crises(eh) and personal notions of the past and present.

Miller also follows Federico García Lorca’s relationship to these Moorish legends, and the politics that led to his assassination.

Jane does create an almost physical stride through the book. There's an exertion that puts a lot of pressure on the reader. To a fault I think. No meditation. No stopping for anything. Jane does not dwell in these poems, she doesn't live in the architecture she works so hard to create (or re-create or whatever). She's just continuously toppling and rebuilding these instances, sort of turning them into steam. But steam does not a poem make. So ehh. Two stars. ( )