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.
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