When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds
- Description
- Product Details
- About the Author
- What People are Saying
- Table of Contents
Over the course of two decades and six books, Peter Markus has been making fiction out of a lexicon shaped by the words brother and fish and mud. In an essay on Markus's work, Brian Evenson writes, "If it's not clear by now, Markus's use of English is quite unique. It is instead a sort of ritual speech, an almost religious invocation in which words themselves, through repetition, acquire a magic or power that revives the simpler, blunter world of childhood." Now, in his debut book of poems, When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds, Markus tunes his eye and ear toward a new world, a world where father is the new brother, a world where the father's slow dying and eventual death leads Markus, the son, to take a walk outside to "meet my shadow in the deepening shade."
In this collection, a son is simultaneously caring for his father, losing his father, and finding his dead father in the trees and the water and the sky. He finds solace in the birds and in the river that runs between his house and his parents' house, with its view of the shut-down steel mill on the river's other side, now in the process of being torn down. The book is steadily punctuated by this recurring sentence that the son wakes up to each day: My father is dying in a house across the river. The rhythmic and recursive nature to these poems places the reader right alongside the son as he navigates his journey of mourning.
These are poems written in conversation with the poems of Jack Gilbert, Linda Gregg, Jim Harrison, Jane Kenyon, Raymond Carver, Theodore Roethke too—poets whose poems at times taught Markus how to speak. "In a dark time . . .," we often hear it said, "there are no words." But the truth is, there are always words. Sometimes our words are all we have to hold onto, to help us see through the darkened woods and muddy waters, times when the ear begins to listen, the eye begins to see, and the mouth, the body, and the heart, in chorus, begin to speak. Fans of Markus's work and all of those who are caring for dying parents or grieving their loss will find comfort, kinship, and appreciation in this honest and beautiful collection.
ISBN-13: 9780814348505
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Publication Date: 09-01-2021
Pages: 110
Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.25(d)
Series: Made in Michigan Writers
Peter Markus is the author of six books of fiction, including The Fish and the Not Fish, which was named a Michigan Notable Book in 2015, and co-editor with Terry Blackhawk of To Light a Fire: 20 Years with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project (Wayne State University Press, 2015). Markus is the senior writer with InsideOut Literary Arts and is on the faculty at Oakland University, where he teaches creative writing. In 2012 he received a Kresge Arts in Detroit fellowship in Literary Arts.
Those of us who live around here refer to Peter Markus's country as 'Down River,' that run of the Detroit River south of the city that passes factories, steel mills, and power plants until it arrives at Lake Erie. It takes a while to learn to love this country. But Peter Markus's people have lived and died here for a long time. When he is shattered and exhausted by grief, as he is in this gut-wrenching collection of poems about the illness and death of his father, Pete can turn to the river and the birds that migrate along it, for consolation. And he finds it there, though it is hard earned consolation, never easy. This collection of clear and powerfully unadorned poems will make you weep, even if you don't know the river, because you, too, know the pain of loss. If you, too, have learned to love Peter Markus's country, When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds will fill your imagination, first overwhelming you, then remaining with you for days and weeks.
For decades, Peter Markus has been rendering mud and fish into stars and sky. For decades, he has been focused on the granular beauty of the poem in every sentence, the universe of each word. In When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds, his heart is somehow open even wider, giving over his own father to the mud and fish and stars and sky, to the birds, mourning as only Peter Markus can, with a river of words.
Walk the river with Peter Markus in his daily homage to his father. Take in the levees, the fish, the abandoned steel mill, the birds, the river air his father will no longer breathe—all rendered with steady wonder and 'the clarity that death brings.' And take comfort. Rather than 'let silence have its way with grief,' Markus gives us—in poems as translucent as the clearest river water—'no better way to say goodbye.'
Peter Markus is on fire in these poems, some holy spirit hovering over him while he's talking in the tongues of grief. The poems turn into each other effortlessly—echoing, resonating, repeating, like waves rolling in, each containing a distinct mixture of both old water and new. He builds each poem around a series of his obsessively recurring images, as if these things need to be held close and continually examined in an attempt to come to terms with the multiple levels of loss, as if he is creating his own language to articulate that loss, a language he teaches us, punctuated with his touchstones—fish, birds, river, boat, steel mill, and others—until we too are left in silent wonder and awe watching him shave his dead father's face with solemn grace.
In When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds, Peter Markus has written an authentic and powerful rite of a book. It's a tribal book, and the tribe is the Living: a humanity, bound by a shared mortality, to honor the dead. That obligation, also known as grief, requires language, gods, myths, visitations, and Markus invents them all afresh in this deeply felt, memorable book.
Only in the transformative blaze of language this lucid, brave, and visionary, can we look through the thin flesh of a dying father and see a bird on a branch ready to fly, can we hear the songs of the gone: everywhere, alive, in river and air. In this astonishing collection, Peter Markus gives grief wings and current, gills and wind. Breathing into the glowing bones of these poems, I feel the momentary resurrection of being imperishable. And I am reminded how to live.
The poems herein are the calls of birds, some sung with great joy in recollection of the kinship between father and son, some sung in sorrow and reflection upon a father's affliction, but all with the clarity of the cup of water the son will fetch from the river to anoint the body. And while the father is held captive in his house on the river, bound there by his infirmity, the cadence of life in the natural world continues—the 'swans on their way to somewhere else,' the pike 'knifing its long narrow body though the light green murk,' and 'the doe and her two fawns crossing the road.' So walk now with Peter Markus as he takes us away through field and wood, through cattail marsh and riverbank mud, to the sick-bed where the father lies, and even onward to the crematorium flames from which smoke ascends as birds might rise 'toward that window we call sky.'
In one of the most luminous and helpful collections of mourning poetry I've read, Markus writes of his father's death with emotional authenticity, wisdom, grace, and casual artistry. These masterful, unassuming poems offer trustworthy company in 'a sorrow / we choose not to talk too much about,' which is when we need it most.
Every line is a revelation in the form of plain truth. The world of these poems plunges us into the river of what matters most: life and death, nature and ruin, hope and despair. Here is a poet who can transform the simplest elements into shimmering, heartbreaking beauty. If Leonard Cohen and Ernest Hemingway had a conversation in heaven, it would be this book.
These poems are heart-voiced and impressed with an intelligence unique only to Markus. Reading each one is a healing process for men grieving over lost fathers.
The poems in Peter Markus's When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds offer a potent, 'momentary resurrection' of father, river, bird—the swirling undertow of what is passing or has passed. Poetry here charts the struggle of grief and devotion within an encroached-upon Michigan landscape. Indeed, poetry is the lone footbridge between the present and the past, the living and the dead. I admire the depth of Markus's seeing and the emotional courage of this collection.
Our fathers do indeed return as birds, as Peter Markus tells us: poem-birds, that is, flown in on a trusted voice, anointed by necessary journeys, consoled and guided by a beloved river, alive with the sacrament called 'I remember. . . .' And they anoint us in return—their readers, who read, gratefully, by the strength of their light.What People are Saying About This
2017) Keith Taylor of the Bird-While (Wayne State University Press
What My Father Did Not Have to Say 1 Look at Those Birds 2 The Name of the Father, the Name of the Fish 3 Practice 4 House with No Light Left on Inside It 5 Everything Where I Have Left It 6 I Take a Walk with the Gods 7 Brothers and Fathers and Sons 8 Who Walks in the Rain Walks on Water 9 The Dark Above the River Is Light 10 South of White Rock, Lake Huron, July 1979 11 There Is Singing 12 Last Song 13 What the Birds Keep Trying to Tell Him 14 More Birds Than I Know What to Do With 15 I Did What I Could to Keep This 16 The Old Neighborhood 17 Because I Could Not Sing 18 The Song and the River 20 My Father's Only Son 21 On the Island in Search of My Father 22 I Did Not Hear the Loons Until Later 23 A Portrait of My Father at the End as Sisyphus 24 Where There Is a River There Is a Light 25 April 6 26 On Turning Fifty-Two 27 No Words 28 Too Many Days, or Where the River Turns to Lake 29 When It Is Dark Enough to See 30 Still Life in Winter with River Ice and Sky 31 Skin of River and Bone 32 Walking Out Alone onto the February River 33 We Did Not Know the Difference 34 I Am Tempted to Say I Know Nothing 35 Winter Birds 36 We Just Wanted to Get Him Home 37 The Bird Inside My Father's Chest 38 What I Know Is Not My Father 39 Carrying the Fish 40 What Was Never His to Begin With 41 When No One Was Looking I Looked 42 Man on Boat 43 What in the Night the Moon Makes 44 When the Light is Still Present but Fading 45 Maybe Next Time 46 The Sentence I Am Trying Not to Write 47 Slow Dance with My Father with No Music 48 Still Life with Goose in Mid-Flight 49 On My Morning Walk I Question What I See 50 Fishing in the Rain with My Father 51 Under the Hood of My Father's '89 Lincoln Town Car 52 On What Would Have Been My Fathers Eighty-Seventh Birthday 53 In the Twilight the Something That Is Always There 54 Where I'm From 55 This Water, This Rock and Dirt, This River 56 On My Daughter's Twenty-Third Birthday 57 What Is Always There Even When It Isn't 58 Where What Was Still Alive Was Singing 59 We Looked for the Birds to Tell Us 60 When the Loons Return to the River 61 Bullhead 62 Almost Human 63 Sheepshead 64 What a Fish Is Not Supposed to See 65 In a Poem He Might Praise the Birds 66 What I Still Feel Inside, or Some Other Darkness 67 Bones 68 When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds 69 Not Able to Say It 70 There Is Always Some Other Way to Say It 71 The Swans Revisited 72 The Moth 73 For My Mother 74 What Did I Know about Work 75 Work Song 76 Whatever It Was It Was an Honor, Call It a Privilege 77 What We Cant Get Rid Of 78 Guilty 79 In Greek the Word for Forgiveness 80 Only the River Between Us 81 We Fish 82 Fear and Death Which Is Different Than Fear of Death 83 I Am Afraid I Am Going to Forget 84 On the Other Side of the River 85 So Much of What We No Longer Want 86 Dead Man's Point 87 On the River with Time Being What It Is 88 Deadwood 89 Wood, Wings, Bones 90 Tell That to Our Fathers, or On the Eve of My Fifty-Third Birthday, Pointe Mouillee, 2019 91 Briefly It Might Have Even Flown 92 Acknowledgments 93Table of Contents