When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds

by Peter Markus

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 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.

Genres: Poetry, Grief

105 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 2021

About the author

Peter Markus is the author of a novel, Bob, or Man on Boat, as well as five other books of fiction, the most recent of which is The Fish and the Not Fish, a Michigan Notable Book of 2015. His fiction has appeared widely in anthologies and journals including Chicago Review, Iowa Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, Quarterly West, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, among many others. He was awarded a Kresge Arts in Detroit fellowship in 2012 and has taught for 20 years as a writer-in-residence with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project.

Reviews

[M. Sarki · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/wh...

...What if all I want is more of the same? Maybe in the end that is abundance…

I read this book a few months ago as an uncorrected proof. It wasn’t formatted correctly so I lost a lot in context due to a lack of good form. But I hold a proper copy of it now in my hands, a rather beautiful artifact, the poetic lines and font exquisite and offering great promise for those of us ready to dive in. A wonderfully loving book that defines its entire focus upon his dying father, his relationship to him and the river below, the birds above, and is often highlighted by Markus adroitly filleting into the meat of his subject. Quite a testament to the love Markus had for his father. The life they shared together. The lessons taught and learned. By book’s end little is known about what initially prompted the cause that did his dad in, other than his refusal to eat after a long illness that made him bedridden, but Markus deftly makes you feel present with him in his process. I cannot express enough the seriousness of this holy testament to love, and I encourage you to read this fine book.

In the book’s publication blurbs, Markus is compared with the great American poet Jack Gilbert, an unfair though flattering similarity. I don’t see much connection other than the format of narrative poetry. Yes, both writers are poetic and lyrical, but the main difference that I see is Gilbert’s words are obscenely perfect and incestual while musically performing their rhythmic dance and cadence on the page. It is a brilliance few of us can emulate. Markus does not produce the same type of poetry as Gilbert does. But that doesn’t lessen the importance, or quality and mastery, of this book in any way. Peter Markus is capable of standing on his own. He doesn’t need Jack Gilbert. Another comparison listed was to another great Michigan writer named Jim Harrison, which feels a bit more on point except Harrison wasn’t much of a poet. However, he could tell stories with the very best of them. Harrison’s “poetry” is similarly narrative and prosaic in form but lacks Gilbert’s perfection stated above for employing the strongest and most incestual words. Plus, it feels obvious to me that Markus comes from a much lesser darkness than Harrison and also requires much smaller portions carved out from the sins of lust and gluttony. It feels to me now, while reading this book for the second time, to be a collection Rick Bass may have written if he chose to write narrative poetry. This is meant as a compliment. Both Rick Bass and Peter Markus emit the deepest love and kindness that issues forth from their strong and personal feelings.

...I was willing to be whoever might help him remember all the times he believed he would never die…

I am happy for anybody who gets to connect with a parent. Very special I would imagine. I tried for years, but finally gave up. I believe my own children will quit trying even sooner in their relationship with me. Not sure if it’s the genes that finally get in the way but I have counseled my adult children to kill them off. They have so far rejected my counsel. I offer this advice to them especially after reading Markus and realizing how fine it might have been having a different mom and dad. Which is worse I wonder? The grief while they are alive or the grieving after their passing?

...I want you to know I care. That I’m wanting to listen. Even when the past gets in the way. We carry our mistakes with us into the present forever. You can go home again but the house is now abandoned, or torn down, or painted yellow, and the people inside don’t know your name and are indifferent to your story. The birds go on singing regardless. The new day and year fill with snow or light or sometimes if we’re lucky both…

Peter Markus has written a fine book about the passing of his father. I know that Peter was there with him in service throughout his passing. These tender memories together are vivid and so unlike my own. Markus remembers the love in his heart for his dead father, the many times they went fishing together or just hung out above the river watching the birds and sky. I never really hung out with my dad. The closest I ever came was after I let go of all his crazy ideas he had about our blood family, the time he asked my stepson to stay out of his seventy-fifth birthday family group photograph as he knew this kid would understand. It made me furious and was the main instrument in my severing of the relationship between father and son. I went ballistic, nutso even, and it was all I could do to keep myself from stepping into the shower after him and beating him to death. Now I don’t have to. Dad is gradually dying on his own time. And though I never forgave him for his bigoted stance about family, and so many other things it would wear me out remembering, I did let go my murderous feelings for him. I look at him with pity now. My dad was of such little mind to think my stepson did not matter in his exclusion in the family photograph. I lost most all the respect I ever had for him, which wasn’t a lot ever since he lied to me about cheating on my mom, lied to me about how often and the number of women he cheated with, and maintained his staunch opposition to me in his agitation, asserting that he only answered to my mother and his god. Through the years he became extremely self-righteous after being forced into attending adult bible school and church regularly with my mother. He would voice his displeasure over Bill Clinton getting a blowjob in what he considered his house, the people’s house, the White House. Dad seemed to forget his own blow jobs and sexual escapades that were parellel to Clinton’s for the mere fact that both of them did what they did because they could. Dad got caught because he left love letters to certain of these women hidden in his clothes drawer that my mom, in his distrust of him or intuition found, she claimed, while cleaning. Today it would be his email she would be rifling through except for the fact that he hasn’t a clue how to use these machines and will likely expire before ever using one. He can never be taught now anyway because he cannot remember much from one moment to the next.

As I read these narrative poems by Peter Markus I felt happy for him and any others who have managed a lasting and rewarding relationship with one or both of their parents. It feels a bit like jealousy, definitely envy, but I also know I too am a part in not having what I claim I wanted. I do retain a fondness however for my deceased father-in-law who became for me more like a father than my own. I certainly respected him and held him in high esteem. He was a man of integrity who, for example, recognized the goodness in our first black president Barack Obama and thus voted for him. Bob died in 2o10 and would have been horrified with these attacks on democracy the Trump supporters rendered on our Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Because of his inherent goodness Bob would never have supported these insurrectionists allied with the Trump family. He would have rejected the policies of Trump’s cabinet, his executive orders, and all his tweeting. In contrast, my parents remain steadfast in their support of Donald J. Trump and all he stands for. It is unfathomable to think I came from these buffoons or that I grew up and escaped the small-town-beliefs of these northern Michigan white supremacists.

The day we got news that my wife's mother Marilyn died in the summer of 1994 we were replacing the roof of our house. Wide open to the weather due to us tearing off the wood shakes and exposing the interior of the house to the weather, my wife and I had no choice but to continue cleaning up our mess and closing the roof back in. What was striking while taking one of our few breaks up on that roof, flat on our backs, watching the street down below with the cars motoring back and forth along the road, was that the world didn’t and wouldn’t stop for Marilyn. It seemed it should, but there was no slowing anything down in order to give proper reverence to her dead mother. Unfeeling and cruel is how it felt. It is something I know I’ll never forget. It is also why I so appreciate the gift Markus gave us by putting his pen to paper and writing this book. For those of us who do read this homage we can say we stopped and we listened and showed our respect for Markus, his dad, and the natural world so prevalent between them. It is a book Peter will one day come to treasure, as will his children, as the now-immortal spirit of his father can live on in perpetuity. At least as long as the planet survives.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary book of poems, written as if the author were possessed, driven. Markus is not playing any games, not looking over his shoulder at the literary world. One of the best reading experiences of the last couple of years, even when I was overwhelmed by Markus's grief. Here's a blurb I wrote for it, that I wish gushed even more:

Those of us who live around here refer to Pete Marcus’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 Pete Marcus’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. These 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 Pete Marcus’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.

[Darrin · Rating 5 out of 5]

When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds is a random pull off the shelf of new poetry in our downtown main library. The book turned out to be one of the best books of poetry I have read this year.

Markus is a Michigander, which I did not realize until I got the book home. Another realization is that Wayne State University near Detroit is also a publisher of many fine books by Michigan authors. I bookmarked the page for a further look when I want to find more poetry by Michigan authors.

The poems are mainly centered around the death of Markus' father. Birds, the St. Clair River, the old steel mill, boats and other subjects, important to his father when he was alive, and to the author, figure prominently in many of the poems. Markus spent a lot of time taking care of his father and helping his mother at the end of his father's life and this is reflected in many of the poems.

I am including here, a link to the Kenyon Review's page where two of the poems from this collection are available for reading, I returned the book to the library before I reviewed the book. These poems are, however, two of many that I really liked:

https://kenyonreview.org/kr-online-is...

Many of the poems moved me and despite most of the poems being about grief and loss, it never seemed like too much. Reading Markus' poetry brought up a lot of memories of my mother's last days and the grief and guilt I felt afterward.

I look forward to more poetry by Peter Markus after this first published volume.

[Elise · Rating 4 out of 5]

this month I've been repeatedly stumbling into books about parents and children being lost, about death, without knowing that that's what's going on. I can't say I should have been surprised by Victoria Chang's *Obit* (though I was). Markus's title is a little less direct, though I guess I could have seen it too. but Yiyun Li's *Wednesday's Child?* anyway, there is a chinese superstition about not spending too much time looking for death in case you find it. this book is about death too and i'm letting you know so you don't bring upon yourself whatever shit i have by going too deep on an accidental trend.

on the book itself: i usually like novel images and experimentation in my poetry and this one says right on the cover that it is about Father(s) and Birds, and indeed basically every poem is about, and has the words, Father and Bird. Also river, fish, death/dead, man, woman, etc, etc. there is not just place but a specific place. a specific set of personalities. a specific tone. it's not so much a bunch of a poetry as many drafts of the same poem about the same grief.

the effect is actually really lovely. a period of grief captured in a talented and luxuriously verbose poetic voice trying to grok its famous ineffability again and again.

i don't know that i would read many collections doing this technique. i am still a novelty-chaser. i like a collection that spans one poet's perspective on the entire world and all of its nouns. but i have learned a lot from reading and appreciating the similarities and differences between individual poems in this book, which do add up to something, a lushness of relationship between the son & father over all the days of the grief being processed.

my own father and i are not close, but he is very much alive, participating in the creation of his own stories. not a symbol. not a bird. i can imagine encountering this book again one day when that changes (convention says "if/when" but of course death is a "when" as long as i outlive him) and feeling different about it again.

recommend for people interested in in Markus' style, in processing grief, & in parental death. do not recommend if you are a birder - the birds are never named, they're always just "birds", the literary idea of bird. :)

[Camille Dungy]

Here are the last three lines of Peter Markus’s poem “Whatever It Was It Was an Honor, Call It a Privilege”: “The night my father died I had to brake three times / to avoid hitting an animal crossing in front of me. / One was an opossum. One was a deer. The third thing / I could not tell what it was. It happened that quick.” Throughout When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds, interconnections between the human heart and the greater-than-human world sing up from the pages, reminding me that the perception of loss is partially a failure of the imagination. Not to say that this book is intolerant of grief nor that it placates with empty platitudes. No. Not that. There is nothing empty or intolerant about how Markus weaves “the language of leaving” into everything he sees and says about the living world.

Review published originally with Orion Magazine: https://orionmagazine.org/2021/12/fif...

[Kara · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had no background knowledge of Peter Markus prior to reading this book. I ordered it from my library because it is part of the Michigan Writers Series.

As I had gathered, these poems surround the impending death, death, and following of his father. Early on, he revisits the same scenes, and does so repeatedly throughout the book. I was taken aback by this, as I rarely have seen this done to the degree it is here. Or done well.

I was able to picture the area, the river, the steel mill, the house, his father. We stay in the same space with him for this journey. And it works. Having lost loved ones, I was impressed how well Peter was able to convey such feelings without saying them.

Is it a book I will revisit? Probably not. More, it is the type of book I am glad I have read.

[Clark Knowles · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to read this book slowly. A poem or two each day. Simple, elegiac, powerful. I want to write more about it, but I just finished it today and need to wait until the echoes fade. I felt, rather than saw these poems. What I mean by that is this: Markus's poems rise from the ground, or the water, and into the body. Although about his experience helping his father die, the book is a resolute proof of life, and is both urgent and patient concerning the subjects of living and dying.

[Raven]

"Whatever words my father might speak/
now that he is dead are obvious ones"

"I do not beg for one more day./
Those days are over. Wait here, I tell them."

"I was willing to be whoever might help him remember/
all the times he believed he would never die."

"When night falls everything in this poem--the birds, the tree/
my father, the river--will remain what they are in the dark."

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartbreaking, light-shining, comforting - a true companion in the dark. This book, though my own father is still with me, I know will become my go-to when he does. Absolutely remarkable in creation - Peter Markus is a master of words and imagery. This has "classic" written all over it.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Markus' recent release is also his debut poetry collection, one written about the growing illness and ultimate passing of his father. Not a light subject, but each page remains packed with shining, blinding light.

[Edward Champion · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mixed bag of poems: some genuinely moving, others pretentious and portentous. Yeah, we get that your father takes on many natural forms. It's magical the first time and tedious the tenth time. The riffs on a theme get stale.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The sorrow and joys of life are side-by-side in this collection in heartbreaking ways, and yet...and yet there is a reminder in each and every poem to pay attention and be aware of the passing of time. To enjoy what we have here, while we have it, and with those around us.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. Highly recommend. Especially if you are grappling with grief. Like Gail Griffin’s Grief’s Country, this makes me, as a fellow human enduring similar sorrows, feel less alone.

[Kristin Lenz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful, evocative, moving. These feel like weak words to describe the depth of Peter's writing; you need to experience this collection yourself to understand. Highly recommended.

[in8 · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://5cense.com/22/998.htm

[Anahiz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautifully heartbreaking piece about the author grappling with his father's death. A bit repetitive, but understandably so. Definitely recommend giving this a read.