The first poem of Cities I Can Never Return To recalls the poet's experience as a six-year-old boy crawling under an old Packard with his dad who, compelled by a need for clarity in an uncertain world, explains the machinery of the drive train he doesn't actually understand. In the second poem, the narrative moves to the forced transition to premature manhood caused by violence. And in the third poem, the boy's sense of the ghosts of the past are manifested in the family's history with trains which represent both an industry where men work as well as a means to escape their lives and begin anew. In the fourth poem "The Tears of the Barber in Snyder Plaza Near the Fountain, Dallas, Texas 1973", the young man senses the grief men carry and their confusion with the mystery at the center of their lives. The young man and his father drive to Iowa to deliver him to graduate school, and the father reveals both his dangerous macho attitudes by racing another driver on the highway, as well as a sincere desire to bless his son's ambition to pursue beauty. The Apache Kid recalls a story of his father's fight in the ring where he was beaten terribly by a young Apache warrior which brings up the violence of the country's founding as well as the poet's vow to break the cycle of violence. The second section explores the young man's alcoholism and addiction and the terrible sadness and tragedy that causes it and is furthered by it. The third section recounts tender moments between the poet and his father. Here the poet speaks movingly of his father who has passed. The fourth section praises men, his friend John Checkeye who owns a shop which sold semi-precious stones; his grandfather Melvin, a 'man's man' who loved hand tools and fishing; and the poet's son who has carried on the family tradition of craft and hard work. Simms also praises his friends Tony Hoagland and Ross Gay for their startling poems and performances. The final section are poems about family life and spiritual awakening. The poet learns to forgive his father and to embrace his own spirituality discovered through art and nature.
About the Author :
Michael Simms is the author of four full-length collections of poetry previously published by Ragged Sky, and he's also published two cycles of speculative novels: The Divine Comedies and The Talon Trilogy. His poems have appeared in Poetry (Chicago), Plume Poetry, Scientific American and Poem-a-Day published by The Academy of American Poets. His poetry has been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Russian and Chinese. Simms is the Founding Editor of Vox Populi, an online forum for poetry, politics and nature, as well as the Founding Editor Emeritus of Autumn House Press. Simms has a long history of activism. From 1990-95, he sat on the Southwestern Pennsylvania Regional Planning Commission. In 2011, the Pennsylvania Legislature awarded Simms a Certificate of Recognition for his service to the arts. In 2023, Simms's poem 'No' was displayed in the Washington National Cathedral as part of the Dear Ukraine exhibit. Simms was born and raised in Texas, but since 1987 he's lived with his wife Eva-Maria, a philosopher and psychologist, in the historic neighborhood of Mount Washington overlooking the city of Pittsburgh.
Review :
From the six-year-old boy who crawled out from the dark undercarriage of his double patriarchal legacies, to "a young man / who drank too much, worked too little, and greeted / kindness with suspicion, " Michael Simms emerges in these fine poems--as one fully-grown man-poet, having sailed away early-after knowledge of many cities, and peoples-with his "catcher's mitt," -the unstopped "ear of a brilliant listener. "
-Mary Jane White, author of
Cities I Can Never Return To lays out the wrong turns and missed chances of a man who bears the responsibility for all his choices; he knows what it means to be lost and found and lost again and found. Then it's "Closing Time" on personal and past family history. And we see and feel how the scars of experience have helped Simms speak directly, modestly, and without falsity. And he does. These are poems that know the difficulty of knowing oneself, no less a world that confounds us with its inhumanity and negligent harm of the given natural world. And yet Simms has learned how to forgive himself, forgive others, and, most importantly of all, accept how "we get what we get," an acceptance that opens "a space large enough to receive the reconciliation of grief and laughter." This is a book I greatly admired both for its poems, and for the person in and behind those poems-a book readers will return to again and again.
-Robert Cording, author of What's Possible: New & Selected Poems
