In Sounds I Cannot Hear Clearly Anymore Add Up to the Sum of Silence, Martin Willitts Jr. traces the many forms silence takes across a lifetime. The silence of a deaf father who refused to learn sign language. The silence between a parent and an estranged son. The silence that follows war. And the gradual quieting of the poet's own hearing.
At the heart of this collection is a father who lost his hearing when his cannon backfired during the Second World War, and a son who would later lose his own partial hearing from shelling as a field medic in Vietnam. Between them lies a lifetime of missed words, lip-reading, fingerspelling, and the ache of communication that never quite arrives. The poems move through childhood memories of rural summers and piano music, through the brutal education of war and its aftermath, into the long grief of watching parents age and die. A mother dissolving into dementia. A father slipping away with his hearing aid still in its unopened package.
Woven throughout is another silence: the poet's son, lost to addiction, who one day calls to say he never wants to see his father again. These poems hold that absence without flinching, returning again and again to the phone that doesn't ring, the road maps that lead nowhere, the fishing trip that turned out to be their last.
Yet the collection is not without tenderness. Willitts finds solace in sign language, in weaving and sheepherding, in the patient work of hands that speak when voices cannot. The final section opens into meditation on snow, on wool spun into thread, on the quiet acts of care that persist after loss.
Dedicated to the hearing impaired, the deaf community, and all people who use sign language, this is a book about what happens in the spaces where sound should be, and how love persists across every silence.
Review :
Martin Willitts Jr proves poem after poem that he is an exceptional storyteller. In his new collection, Sounds I Cannot Hear Clearly Anymore Add Up to the Sum of Silence, Willitts writes, "Rain asks, why does silence have so many languages?" In these poems, Willitts questions what is heard and misheard, sound and silence, and, in turn, subjective vs. consensus reality. These poems traverse terrain between spoken and unspoken: "They never tell you this when you're growing up - / all these motions you must muddle / and paddle through." And, "I have no easy answers and still don't. / But I begin with the hard ones." In a mid-collection poem, Willitts writes, "Life's hardest lessons / leave no rational justifications." These poems are full of lines that speak hard and necessary truths.
- Mark Danowsky, Editor-in-Chief, ONE ART: a journal of poetry
Many notes make up a song, and many poems, each a pure tone, make up a collection such as this one, unified by the theme of sound and its loss, asking what is left when the echoes die away. Each poem is deft and graceful, weaving together recollection and event, meaning and perception, or war's sudden harms and their slow healing. These poems examine life after birdsong, after music, when literal deafness expands into the silence between generations -- but never with anger, only with regret and love and, sometimes, acceptance.
- Stuart Anderson, winner of the Thomas Merton Poetry Award 2010
What happens when the sounds of life begin to slip away? This powerful collection attempts to answer this question by tracing the way lives are shaped by sound as well as by its absence. From a father's war-related deafness to the speaker's shifting relationship with language and his own son, Willitts expertly examines the breakdown of language, the limits of hearing, and the emotional landscapes that emerge in their place. Lyrically tender and unflinchingly honest, these poems navigate family, fatherhood, addiction, loss, and resilience; revealing how even in quiet, connection endures.
- Keith Kopka, Author of Count Four (University of Tampa Press, 2020)
Martin Willitts Jr.'s Sounds I Cannot Hear Clearly Anymore Add Up to the Sum of Silence assembles a resonant and intricately layered chorus of language in which silence demands attention. As evocative as it is deliberate, the rhythm and cadence of his prose pulse like a steady heartbeat, animating this intimate meditation into a deeply embodied experience of listening, remembering, and reckoning. Listen closely.
- Andrew C. Peterson, Harvard University
