“How My Father Became a Boat” by John Miller 

Reviewed by Jennifer Horne

Grief can take myriad forms after the loss of a beloved parent: memorials, rituals, foodways, domestic shrines, or just silence. Poets tend to grieve in writing. The collection in How My Father Became a Boat (Fernwood Press 2025), was assembled over many years (some of the poems have original journal publication dates of 2013, 2016, and 2017) and testifies to the slow distillation of memory and recovery, the accommodation of a changed present to a still-very-present past. The echo of Faulkner is apropos to this literate and literary book. In the title poem, Miller alludes to the child Vardaman’s statement in As I Lay Dying: “My mother is a fish,” as Miller meditates on his young nephew’s statement when the boy points at “Pop’s” boat, out of the water in a sling: “Him resting.”

But Miller’s South is not Faulkner’s. Although he has ventured as far north as Tuscaloosa and Alabama’s Black Belt, his spiritual home, however vexed, is the Gulf Coast. All roads, though sometimes meandering and poorly paved, lead south. In “Backroads Ovid,” Miller writes, “In motion at least, I can imagine something / like my way” and two pages later, in “Evinrude Ode,” the hum of tires on asphalt transports him via sound-memory to “the many hours / I hummed along with his outboards / running from Navy Cove to Sand Island / from Cedar Point to Petit Bois.”  The identification of his father with his boat echoes a deeply poignant moment earlier in the book, when the speaker puts his head to his father’s “still-warm chest // to listen—who knows for what— / the burr of his outboard’s idle / the peal of a long wave breaking” (“After a Prolonged Illness”).

Fittingly, for a book that takes as one of its main subjects water, specifically the bay and ocean, these poems—over the course of the book’s six named sections, each carrying an epigraph from one of that section’s poems—ebb and flow, rather than describing a straight line from initial event to reconciliation with loss. In the many poems that engage with his father’s death and his influence on his life, in several poems about his mother and grandmother as elegant, brave survivors, and in elegies that mourn a professor, an old friend, a windshield-washing dervish known as “Hustle-Man,” and figures from his childhood, Miller recognizes he is learning from them how to “practice hope” (“Hope’s Hollow Bones”). It is a slow and circling process, at times requiring that he dive deep to survive; taking the boat out to the bay at night, he writes of how “I kick down towards the soft silt / just beyond light’s reach” and, swimming up, “. . . lunge past the surface, my lungs / raw with effort, aching with life” (Sleeping Porch”).

Running through the book is the theme of what it means to be a man, and Miller’s father appears as sage, as stern mentor, as trickster-figure, as ethical model, and as mystery. In one poem early in the book, he recalls the reporter who tracked him down for a quote after his father’s death, asking about the man who was “party boss, warhorse lawyer, legendary / / for his force of will…” (“After a Prolonged Illness”). And then, in “Be It Ever So Humble,” and throughout the book, Miller explores his own contradictions, his reasons for leaving the coast, the place he loves: “I doubt I would have survived Mobile / . . . enduring countless variations on: / I remember your father.”

More intimately, in “His Sky-Blue Tie” and “Keeping the Sacraments,” he writes of trying to fill his father’s shoes at his brother’s wedding. He can literally fill the wingtips, stretched on shoe-trees, but he cannot, though wearing the talismanic sky-blue tie, summon his father’s word-magic for a toast: “I’d misjudged my talent / / to unravel time, to bring him—if briefly—back” (“His Sky-Blue Tie). The title of this book points toward becoming, and at the heart of it is a man learning how to become fully himself through a deliberate effort to understand who his father was. One conclusion that may resonate with many sons (and perhaps daughters as well): “fixing things // … was how our father showed he cared” (“What I Knew”).

Part of the way Miller seeks to stay connected to his father is through the physical world, not only shoes and a tie but the myriad parts of a boat, the skill of navigation—what Gerard Manley Hopkins, in “Pied Beauty,” called “áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.” In this way he finds some continuity through change, some measure of ritual in letting go. In “Vessels,” the two brothers “rig fenders,” “tie half-hitches / and fuse frayed ends as we were taught.” They are preparing the boat, the metonymous figure for their father, to be sold to another family, “a young father upriver / / whose sons will learn the way to care / for a boat like my brother and I did.”

From his father, Miller also inherited a legacy of engagement with language. “My Drug of Choice Is the Dictionary” as a title tells you all you need to know. “OED” (for Oxford English Dictionary), is referred to as “our good book,” from which he learns “that grief stems from the same root / / as gravity….” Like the bread crumb trails in a dictionary, with the imperative to “See” this word or that, Miller’s poems often echo, enhance, and deepen the meaning of others, sending you back to one you’ve already read with different eyes. There’s that sky-blue tie again, there’s the river, here are broken ribs, and here are the ribs of a long-sunk ship. (I’m grateful, among other things, that Miller sent me back to my happily battered college dictionary, the physical, clunky, wonderful book with no distraction other than neighboring words, interlocking etymologies, the kinds of discoveries that can never happen online. I have used it occasionally, nostalgically, in recent years, but it is now propped next to my reading chair, my phone and its dot.com definitions banished across the room.)

His father’s concern for justice, as well, shines through the son’s concerns, in such poems as “Calculations from the Moral Arc,” “A Ripple of Hope,” “Greatest of These,” and “Eye of the Storm.” A COVID summer combines with Black Lives Matter protests, individual acts of racist violence stand next to the systemic racism by which “Plantation ruins ossify next to shotgun shacks / that slouch toward housing projects, where people / were made slaves, prison labor, and sharecroppers / before they became sawmill workers, catfish farmers” (“Calculations from the Moral Arc”). His father’s lesson: “the past is a prison the South is afraid to leave” but, as an admirer of Robert Kennedy, he believed that “a ripple sings forth when we stand up” (“A Ripple of Hope”).

I want to be sure, before I close, to praise the structure and design of this book—the evocative names for each section, the epigraphs, the way the poems reference and interact with one another, based on a skillful ordering. In its physical design, the book is a pleasure as well, and the inclusion of a Title Index and a First Line Index as back matter is a nice old-school, not to mention helpful, touch, from Fernwood Press of Newburg, Oregon.

Miller’s assured poetic voice, declarative (a voice speaking), rather than performative (a voice shouting to be heard), is engaging and approachable, never lugubrious, leavened with saving humor. There are so many extraordinarily crafted phrases I want to quote from this book, for the sounds of the words, for the images, richly painted and played and sung, that take you straight into the moment, as when, for example, wind pushing at the river reveals “gunmetal mud flats that set off / gold blades of marsh grass against / oyster-shell skies” (“Bedfellows). But for that you really should read the book, and let its music carry you along.

John Miller

John Miller was raised in Mobile, Alabama and his poems have appeared in journals like Anti-Heroin Chic, Comstock Review, Poetry South, Rockvale Review, Susurrus, and elsewhere. Miller is an assistant professor and assistant director of New College at the University of Alabama.