8/14/2019 Review of Father's Day by Philip Miller

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Review of  Father's Day by Philip Miller (The Ledge Press, 1995)

Every son carries on a love/hate relationship with his father. This fact first hit home with

me when I was four or five, learning from my father how to play checkers and realizing he wasn't

ever going to let me win. After I lost about two hundred games in a row, the image I had of my

father changed: he no longer was simply my supporter and defender, he was also my principal

rival in life.

Such push-pull occurs in the happiest of families, but its effects are especially pronounced

in dysfunctional families. In his excellent chapbook  Father's Day, Philip Miller recounts his

relationship with his father, a troubled alcoholic and family tyrant. Through these poems Miller 

grapples with the distance between father and son which inevitably resulted.

Enormous wanting underlies every poem in this collection. Growing up the author 

desperately wanted, but never was able to receive, attention and approval from his father. In

"Other People's Fathers," the author as a young boy wanders away from his drunk father to other 

yards seeking a proper father-like presence: "in sore need of some strong-armed/paternity . . . I

would wander up to one/clipping hedges or staking his tomatoes,/and loll around, asking too

many questions,/a sure sign I needed something" (p. 7). Here is a kid who understood early in life

his father was emotionally A.W.O.L., leaving him to his own devices to fill the void.

What little emotion the author's father did manage to display seemed less than genuine,

 because he could only truly let himself go while drunk. In "It's in the Blood" (pp. 27-28), the

author is embarrassed by his father's habit of kissing him, a sign of affection to be sure, but one

that strikes a false note due to his father's intoxication. Likewise, the few joyful moments his

father experienced were artificial, for they were motivated by alcohol: "Sometimes father sang a

8/14/2019 Review of Father's Day by Philip Miller

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tune/or two after short swigs/of Fleischmann's gin/when he was in between/sober and mean

drunk,/something he called 'only tipsy.'" Such joy was always short-lived, however, lasting only

until the "mean drunk" emerged. Miller says his father's singing was "bluesy and off key/enough to

make us laugh/a second, lose track of where/the evening surely headed,/when he'd sing a different

tune/and let us have it/with both barrels." ("His Old Tune," pp. 25-26).

Despite our best efforts, we often become what we swore we wouldn't. As an adult, the

author wonders whether he is passing along his father's emotionally crippled legacy: "What the

son forgets/won't be forgiven;/it feeds his blood,/darkens his eye:/poor father that he will

 be,/unforgiving in his bones and blood/sharing with his sons/the knowledge of this

growing/animal, watching as they grow/silent, too, and stare at the ground/tracking" ("Written in

the Stars," p.13). The author returns several times to the theme of forgetting and forgiving. He

 believes forgetting is a function of the head, forgiving a function of the heart. Reconciling the two

 becomes the key to breaking out of the cycle of damage wrought by one's emotionally dead, and

alcohol-deadened, forebears.

Miller is at his best when such glimpses of understanding inform his poems. I can't say

enough good things about this chapbook. The author movingly depicts the universal dilemma with

which all fathers and sons are familiar. It's the same drama cast in infinitely different ways -- in my

case illustrated by a father who I knew was proud of me but who could never bring himself to tell

me so.

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