Father (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Father Diane Gilliam (bio) Jeff Daniel Marion . Father. Nicholasville, Ky.: Wind Publications, 2009. 88 pages. Paperback, $15.00. Father, by Jeff Daniel Marion, is a collection of poems that chronicles the shifting story of a son's perceptions of his father from first memory through the passages of young manhood to the death of the father and beyond. Readers of Marion's work will find in Father an extraordinary range of feeling and language. In poems like "The Man Who Loved Hummingbirds," we see the divine aspect of the father, who rescues the tiny bird that has flown into a window: He cradled its body in his cupped / hands and breathed across the fine / iridescent chest and ruby throat. // ... // Then the bird stirred and rose / to perch on his thumb. / As he slowly raised his hand // the wings began to hum / and my father's breath lifted / and flew out across the world. Throughout the book, we see the father in his archetypal role as provider, whether in exile in Michigan, or in the ink room of the International Playing Card & Label Company, where the ink and work indelibly mark the lives of men, as: batches of rainbow the boys carry home / on shirts and pants, their wives knowing / it's the permanent palette of work, the stain / no amount of washing would ever make clean, / color the lasting clock to mark their time. Whether it is a matter of shoes, birdhouses, fishing or frugality, the father's world is the world of things done right, made square, plumb, and level. There's holiness in that kind of earthly, worked-for rightness, so that when the father is ordained as a deacon, he is attended by such men as "Ray Price / who could fine-tune any engine / to a silky purr, knuckles dark with ground- / in grease, stain that shone beyond / his dress shirt's starched cuffs." The image of stains recurs in the son's memories of this world of men among men, a steady, often joyful world to which the son longs to be admitted. It is a telling motif because, for all the beauty of the fathers—and it is considerable and powerfully rendered—there is also a shadow side. [End Page 86] In Marion's Father, much of that shadow side lives in the junkhouse the father keeps out back. It is perhaps not so much the contents of the house, as the forbidding of it—"'Son, / you don't need to be messing with the things / in my house'"—that makes the junkhouse a touchstone for a wounding sense of exclusion on the part of the son. The catalogue of betrayals comes in "Prayer to a Dead Father," its episodes spanning a whole life, from failed, frightened lessons in shoe-tying through the son's return from college to the father's "belief that I was / ruined by books, words you claimed / were back talk and sass." Although hinted at earlier, the element of betrayal is most present in the last section of the book. It surprises, given the many strong, steady, portrayals of the father that have come before. But this is the nature of betrayal: the surprise, and also the deep trust and love that precede it. Just as swiftly as the tenderness of the father with the hummingbird called the reader's heart to rise, his apparent cruelty causes the heart to fall: At thirteen my two buddies the beaglesyou brought home as pups, pennedout back, hungry to break free,lay back their ears in a lope,trail every luring scent:a mile from home, noses to ground,you found them, jerked each upby an ear, swung them like feedsacks,yelps and howls worse than my screams,rage doubled by your threat to swingme by an ear if I didn't shut up. So great is the divide between the father at this moment and the father of the inkroom or the father as deacon, so difficult is it to hold the tension of those two portrayals which are both so deeply felt as true, that we know we are in a powerful, archetypal space. This...