by Michael Lithgow
Cormorant Books
2021/$18.95/72 pp.
Michael Lithgow’s second poetry collection, Who We Thought We Were As We Fell, is not an easy read. If you are looking for blithe assurances that the world is a good place to be or that the plethora of current catastrophes will turn out okay, or even that human beings are fundamentally good, this is not the book for you. That said, if you find solace in companionable misery, in truthful pessimism, in the “violence/ of a fallen home” and in acknowledging that pain and change are parts of human experience, Lithgow’s collection will more than meet you halfway.
In most of these poems the speaker functions as a secular prophet of melancholy and mortality. “Beside the road is a sad pageant of dead animals,” Lithgow writes, “ruined bodies every few clicks.” Awareness of personal mortality is never far from the speaker’s mind. “Little bits of me are perishing everywhere,” he states. The poems are detritus, the ash of what came before.
At times I found the collection almost unrelentingly bleak. Geographic drift and desuetude and entropy. Life slumping into death, summer into fall, day into night. But tenderness is here too, and attendant images of hope: “I watch the movements of my daughter’s fingers/ opening and closing in darkness like sea anemone/ her small body asleep in my arms.” And Lithgow’s description of thin places, moments where the universe, or God, or whatever one’s understanding of transcendent meaning is, almost breaks through, are spare and evocative: “More than once at the kitchen table,” he writes, “I’ve mistaken/ the sound of dust settling on my forearm for a blessing.” Lithgow interrogates what is seen and unseen, what is shown and what is present. At its best, the collection offers self-deprecating honesty in a social media world where we often present ourselves at our most curated. The poems are polished but the material is raw and bleeding.
The final poem of the collection, “What Remains,” suggests that poetry can fruitfully adopt a posture of witness, what Carolyn Forché calls “poetic witness to the dark times.” This posture of witness sees Lithgow attempting to approach the horror of the Holocaust, knowing that his Jewish daughter will one day have to approach it herself. On a trip to Poland, he carries a wry, sardonic awareness of the frailty and the foolishness of humans, while also seeking how to live well in the shadow of extremism and violence. “I heard no voices of the dead,” he writes, “because what is more silent than death?” For Lithgow, poetry seems to be an attempt at personal catharsis, a way to forestall death and linger in the unknowing, “[a]n uncertain centre swaying in the lullabies of a storm.”
Benjamin Hertwig is a writer and artist from Edmonton.
