A luminous and heartfelt collection of mourning poetry.
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.
Industry Reviews
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 "Split Rock Review" (2/11/2022 12:00:00 AM)
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.--J. A. Tyler "author of The Zoo, a Going" (3/1/2021 12:00:00 AM)
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.--Stuart Dybek "author of Ecstatic Cahoots" (3/1/2021 12:00:00 AM)
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.--Diane Seuss "author of Frank: Sonnets, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, and Four-Legged Girl" (3/1/2021 12:00:00 AM)
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.--Keith Taylor "author of The Bird-while (Wayne State University Press, 2017)" (3/1/2021 12:00:00 AM)
