Review: Michael Garrigan
On Robbing the Pillars by Michael Garrigan
by Tyler Truman Julian
In Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, Jane Smiley argues that poetry is poetry because of its form and structure—that a poem requires memorization to retain its title off the page. Fiction on the other hand does not require memorization to retain its impact because of its sweep and depth. Rather than remembering words, cadence, and rhythm—Smiley asserts—the reader of fiction remembers the way something made her feel, the scene, the moment in which something was read. In general, I tend to agree with Smiley on just about everything, with the fervent devotion of an ancient zealot to the poet-god Apollo. Yet, in Robbing the Pillars by Michael Garrigan, I found myself transported, pulled along beautifully from image to image in the way a master storyteller leads you from lesson to lesson. This storyteller sits on a porch in a dying coal town in Pennsylvania, somewhere between Appalachia, the Rust Belt, and the Susquehanna River, and his poetry is so deeply tied to place and memory that often the nuance of the poetic device is overwhelmed by the emotion and image of the moment, leaving the door open to powerful connection between reader and speaker, reader and poet, reader and the Susquehanna area of Pennsylvania.
Garrigan’s poems are driven by their speaker in a way that grates against Smiley’s definition but settles easily into the reader’s mind and heart. This storyteller is a fisherman, telling much more than fish stories. His connection to the space around him explores universal questions of life and death and the hereafter. Watching the coal companies come and go, witnessing the decay of a community, wading through a river older than the continent on which it flows, he declares:
It is the after that bother me, the desire to be remembered.
But that is the wrong word. Not remembered, but useful.
The best things in this life are still useful in this death—
leaves, roadkill, salmon, antler, orange peels.
Plant me in the moss. Lay me in the sun. Float me in the river.
An afterlife of decomposition into the universal consciousness of soil and water.
Cleave the grain of each day with the certainty of a useful death.
(“Life-Cage”)
There is something large here, larger than any one person, any one community, and Garrigan reaches for it with each cast of his speaker’s flyrod. In “Native, Wild, Invasive,” the speaker explores his troubled relationship to his home, a community impacted by economic forces out of its control and environmental changes larger than its small corner of the world. He recognizes the interconnectedness of all things, the religiosity of this connectedness, saying, “When continents broke and shifted natives / survived spread on wings, safe in eddies and cracks of granite. / Genes stretched over thousands of years, unfathomable generations.” There is a hope here: Survival is real. There is a question here: What does it take to survive? Garrigan’s speaker does not pretend to have the answers. He does not even seem to know exactly where he fits in the present moment where mountain living, development, and deindustrialization all meet around his home, the Susquehanna. The only constant is a mindful attention to the present moment that is nearly spiritual, self-preserving.
“We
spill
out,”
he tells us, “so our roots don’t rot / in this saturated soil” (“Two Weeks of Rain”). Garrigan writes toward something that often disappears when people tackle subjects of climate change, environmental degradation, and familial decay. Garrigan’s speaker thinks in geological time, to recognize all the things that make the present moment what it is: “The sex of rivers and concrete / comes from the love making of thick / forests and springs” (“Gluten Free Lap Dances”). This stretching of time, interrupted by the poetic moment, runs contrary to many expectations of poetry, but cuts to the heart of the human condition in the way only poetry can.
Michael Garrigan’s Robbing the Pillars bears witness to a changing world. In a 2017 interview with New York Public Radio, another author of fiction I deeply admire, Claire Vaye Watkins, announced, “I don’t know if storytelling is the thing that’s gonna get us out of this awful current moment we’re in, in the long-long moment, the long current moment we’re into, like geologically, but it’s what I have to offer.” The poetic storytelling of Robbing the Pillars humanizes change and challenges us to reflect on the impact climate change, economic policy, and what and how we choose to remember have on our lives and our communities.