When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds

by Peter Markus

Wayne State University Press $16.99

Reviewed by Jeff Fearnside

A river runs throughout Peter Markus’s poetry collection When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds: the Detroit River. It is present on almost every page, whether the characters are boating on it, fishing its waters, walking its levees, or simply taking in its unceasing course while estimating the size of passing boats and admiring their lines.

While strongly featuring water, Markus also thoroughly grounds his readers. Even if that grounding is in the muddy riverbed, where “It is not uncommon / to sink down in up to your knees” (32), these poems are rooted in a place that could not be any other place. This is the Great Lakes Rust Belt of working-class immigrant families, empty and decaying steel mills, and resilient nature that has found niches in which to flourish in this industrial corridor.

Primarily, though, this book is an anatomy of a relationship between father and son. It is a treatise on familial bonds and obligations. It is both a lament for a life gone and a celebration of what might, as the collection’s title suggests, live on. 

Reading this poetry collection meant a lot to me for several reasons. I grew up only an hour south of where these poems are set. Like their speaker, I was born into a blue-collar family whose father spent some time working in a Rust Belt factory. And, like the speaker, I lost my own father not long ago. My family dynamics and the circumstances of my father’s death were completely different. Still, this book spoke to me directly, pulled me in completely, and entranced me. It rings true down to every detail of muddy waters, icy winters, and the little ways some people show love not through words but through actions like changing dead batteries in cars, filling tires with air, oiling gears on a dock, and tinkering with outboard engines.

We are privy to honest, unflinchingly intimate details about the long, slow death of the father: the catheter tubes, the bedsores, “His bed and his body in the bed covered in shit” (77). We see the son spoon him strawberry yogurt and, after death, shave him “one last time before they wrapped him up,” his mother “happy / to see his face so clean it was almost shining” (25).

The language in these poems is as solid as bedrock and spare as bone, both as quick and slow as water, whether moving along a channel or navigating a bend. It always feels appropriate to these people and their place: economical, elemental, and close to the core, never excessive, incidental, or ostentatious.

Seemingly simple images repeat throughout: of birds and fish, mud and water, darkness and light, the dead and dying. Yet nothing is superfluous. Each image links so tightly to the others that they form a remarkable web of motifs.

For example, in one poem the speaker notes, “Beneath these boots is limestone” (35), and at first this reads straightforwardly as an affirmation of the ground’s solidity. Then at the end of the poem comes this statement: “All of this / will be here when we’re not, our bones / ground down to a fine white dust.” Immediately it’s recalled that limestone is composed of the skeletons of ancient sea creatures. Four pages later the speaker reflects on his father’s bones “ground down to a fine white ash” carried in an urn in his pocket.

Later still, the speaker carries “the bones / of dead animals” in his pockets. This series of connections clearly suggests that humans and nature are one and ultimately return to the same source, an insight that’s a boon to the living. “I am a rich man,” the speaker says (68).

Markus’s When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds is openhearted in its exploration of grief, bold in its hope that there may be some form of living after death, and realistic in admitting that “no one can prepare / you for how we leave the world” (19). In its poems, the living bury the dead the best they can. The speaker admits, “We did what we could / when we could. Which was always not enough” (52). Yet these poems together feel like more than enough, like buoys in a channel to mark our way. 

Jeff Fearnside is the author of Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in the Air (Stephen F. Austin State University Press) and Ships in the Desert (forthcoming from SFWP Press). His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Paris Review, Los Angeles Review, The Pinch, Story, and Forest Under Story: Creative Inquiry in an Old-Growth Forest (University of Washington Press). Honors for his work include a Grand Prize in the Santa Fe Writers Project’s Literary Awards Program, the Peace Corps Writers Poetry Award, and an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship. He teaches at Oregon State University.