Who We Thought We Were as We Fell, Michael Lithgow
Cormorant Books, 2021
At the level of poetic technique, Lithgow’s work throughout this text can be characterized as pleasantly understated. The sonic quality of the poems in Who We Thought We Were as We Fell is sustained without coming across as excessive – even playful internal rhymes (such as “their pale shades of vinyl / siding hiding everything,” from “Lengths of Grass”) do not distract from the rigorously focused nature of much of the work. Neither does Lithgow’s commitment to a controlled poetic approach bar him from using compellingly unsettling imagery, as when feelings of grief “turned in my stomach like a cold fat snake” (in “What I Did With Mourning in the Morning, After My Father Died”), or when “the tops of far-off buildings appear like small teeth” (in “Hospital Morning”). Many of the poems in this book show Lithgow to be incredibly proficient in the art of poetic pacing – one can look to “At the Podiatrist’s”, one of the longer pieces in the text. A clear-eyed meditation on aging, it builds on itself with a quiet ferocity until it reaches its apex in this fantastic line: “I won’t be lamed by time just yet, but I’ve tasted its incivility, / and it’s not the first I’ve heard star dust roaring in my ears.”. This piece (among many others) is emblematic of the poet’s admirable ability to sit with the indignities of life, to contemplate their strange ineffability, and to persevere in attempting to set them out in words.
Though this commitment to a relentless contemplation is present throughout Who We Thought We Were as We Fell, not every poem in the book is imbued with the same level of focus. Temporarily leaving aside the pieces which have more of a prose poem sensibility (which are nearly all excellent – I have the impression that this is Lithgow’s specialty), I would contrast the poems “Barnacle” and “Love and Rockets” in the hope of illustrating the uneven nature of parts of the work. The former piece is both effectively concise and keenly observant (and furthermore contains one of the most enjoyable rhymes in the book, with “I feel them turn towards me / as I pass. Snowdrops are low / and blind in the grass.”). “Love and Rockets” is unfocused in comparison, containing discordant mixed images and a fairly clumsy attempt at overcoming a cliché through acknowledgment (the opening line of the poem being “O for fuck’s sakes another poem about the agonies of love”). There are a handful of poems in this book that feel more like sketches than complete declarations, though this fact does not take away from the brilliance of much of the text. If anything, it simply serves as a reminder of the profoundly complex and harrowing nature of the subject matter that Lithgow deals in.
In reading Who We Thought We Were as We Fell, one is imbued with that melancholic feeling which is so familiar to so many of us – and then, through the clarity of the poet’s observations and connections, that feeling takes on a subtle change, becomes slightly less opaque. In a world where everyone must live with grief and perpetual indignity, it is a sincerely heartening thing to have effective literary examples, in terms of both reckoning and perseverance. It is a project of tremendous difficulty that Lithgow takes on with this book, and the high degree to which he succeeds is very much worthy of praise.
