A Review of The Weather of Our Names

The first poem in The Weather of Our Names, Cal Freeman’s excellent new collection, depicts a scene set in Applegate Nursing Home. The poet’s mother, a nurse, is performing the Eugene Field poem “The Duel” from memory “to a cohort of closed-head injury residents.” The speaker and his father are eating cold Kentucky Fried Chicken and observing the performance, as well as a patient’s painful efforts to contribute to the recitation. Note the layering of memory matters: the event is a story from the poet’s memory, his mother is reciting a memorized poem, the residents she is nursing may have memory issues, and the facility’s name itself may memorialize what it used to be, “a squat brick building / that might once have been the site of an orchard /gate opening onto rows of apple trees.”

We learn in the book’s next poem that Freeman’s father has died, meaning that he, too, has been reduced to memory.

Not that memory can be trusted, Freeman reminds us. Time, each individual’s limited perspective, and our tendency for nostalgia all impact the veracity of the old narratives in every person’s head, including his own. He goes so far as to title one prose poem “Prologue to a Fiction.” Faulkner’s well-known quote about the past insists that it is never dead, or even in the past. Freeman’s rejoinder in this collection: The past is dead. Gone. Irrecoverable. And is recalled inaccurately.

Many poems in this book lay out ways in which Freeman resembles his father. They share a name and a fondness for basketball. The elder John Calvin Freeman was an English professor and a reader of poetry until his death. In “Adrian Dantley (AD) Circa 1890s,” the poet remembers his father teaching The Tempest at Wayne State University and letting class out early to join his family at a Detroit bar to watch the end of a Pistons playoff game. The Pistons lost the game against Boston—a last-second heartbreaker that fans will remember for life. Less than two years later, the team traded away the poet’s favorite player, causing Freeman, a boy at the time, to sob on his mother’s shoulder, “like we were saying goodbye forever to somebody / we loved. It’s the first time I remember feeling that way.”

Another poem addressing his father’s death, and the tasks that keep us from grieving properly and head-on after such an event, is “Schedule K-1 Form From Southern Pennsylvania Propane Company as a Non-Fungible Token.” The speaker complains of an accountant’s use of investment terms such as “pass-through entity”:

I don’t understand what any of this means,
but it sounds like the language of my father’s death,
the kind of language I’ve been hearing
since my father’s death.

It’s not just his father who is gone. It is all that time takes: friendships, businesses, industries. In “Those Vacation Plans You Made,” Freeman writes:

The mind must long for gone places
when the body cannot visit,
the kinds of places the imagination
concocts when the kinds of places
you once loved have shuttered.

The book’s title poem is one of four written in prose. In it, Freeman tweaks the famous William Carlos Williams quote about “things” and tells us, “there are no ideas but in place.” Places that interest Freeman include off-the-beaten-path motels, industrial and post-industrial Detroit, bars, roads, and more roads forming the grid of southeast Michigan, and local rivers and lakes. A reader may occasionally be inclined to label Freeman a “nature poet,” but often the nature he captures exists in small pockets, struggling cheek-by-jowl beside rail yards and declining industry. A small stand of pine trees abuts a Taco Bell. State land shares a border with a scabbed-up motel pool. Rivers are “full of PFAS, gobies, and damsel flies.”

The Huron River also happens to run alongside the cemetery where Freeman’s father’s ashes now reside. At the interment, we learn in “Ode to Coca-Cola, Helium, Carbon,” the poet, instead of writing something himself for the occasion, recites a Delmore Schwartz poem.

I’m not finishing poems much these days.
I keep name-checking my father’s
favorite poets, though, instead
of saying what I don’t know how to say
about finitude and grief.

The danger of caring about place, Freeman points out, is that it may come at the expense of knowing people. Several relatives on both sides of his family struggled with mental illness, alcoholism, or both. What should the poet concentrate on: his people and their suffering, or the image of the backyard as seen through a sliding glass door?

What is most consistently on display throughout The Weather of Our Names is Freeman’s wide-ranging curiosity and affection

Freeman describes himself, unromantically, as someone who drinks too much. After his father’s death, the danger of this becomes more appreciable: “My father has just died at 70. I have just turned 41. I joke with people that I’m halfway to 82. I’ve been thinking a lot about mortality. My grandfather died at 60. My father took good care of himself and got 10 more years than his father. I live more like my grandfather than him.”

Freeman is the author of two previous full-length collections: Fight Songs and Poolside at the Dearborn Inn. All three books contain stories from his past and funny-sad anecdotes about family (both immediate and extended), but The Weather of Our Names feels less “confessional” than the previous two books in the airing-of-secrets, burning-of-bridges sense. He depicts his family with more tenderness. He questions how authoritative his memory even is.

Nine poems in The Weather of Our Names take, at least in title, the form of Yelp reviews. These include “Yelping the Huron River Inn Restaurant,” “Yelping the Tegmine,” and “Yelping the Mr. Fresh Drive-Thru Convenience Store.” The poems aren’t “reviews” at all, and often have little to say about ambiance or service. “Yelping Portofino Restaurant” tells us more about the speculative-fiction writer Richard Sharpe Shaver than it does about the restaurant, and the primary subject of “Yelping Echo’s” is a now-dead Detroit folk singer who performed Irish rebel songs and befriended Freeman’s grandparents.

Freeman presents possibly the most complete picture of himself in “Dichotomy Paradox as a Non-Fungible Token.” We encounter Freeman the griever (“I want my father back. I want a different father with the same tastes / and the same loves”), and Freeman the drinker, having whiskey with his sandwich at a bar for lunch. Freeman, the reader of philosophy and theology (including Zeno, the pre-Socratic philosopher, and John Calvin, Freeman’s namesake). Freeman, the denizen of Michigan during a bleak and snowy February, shoveling his sidewalk and scraping his car windows. He reads a book of Fanny Howe’s poems at the bar, making his annotations “with a Keno pencil.” Another day drinker asks Freeman if the poetry collection is his Alcoholics Anonymous booklet, causing Freeman to respond, “I tell him I’d have flunked out / within a few hours, but I’ve got step one down.”

This skillful and captivating blend of registers—the quips of drunks, the theology, the diction contained in sentences like, “A good barroom / needs a good haruspex the way prophecy needs a self to fulfill / its self-fulfilling augurs”—is a hallmark of Freeman’s poetry. He frequently opts for the multisyllabic word, to great effect, done not to impress but to allow his love for abstruse words to shine through. He acknowledges his tendencies in “Yelping the Waterfront”: he uses “spangle” in a descriptive passage before confessing, “spangle because ‘coruscate’ / sounds too strange and arcane, even for a poem / of mine.”

In “Racing Simulcast as Non-Fungible Token,” it is Ivan Ilyich, a window air-conditioning unit sealed and repaired with Scotch tape, and a horse race shown on a casino television that get the deft Freeman balancing.

Another poem that juggles the poet’s range of class-indicative interests is “The City of Champions,” the rare Freeman piece not set in Michigan. This Pittsburgh poem juxtaposes new historicism with a Sunoco gas station, the purchase of condoms and antacids with the late NFL fullback Franco Harris and the notion of grace. If you don’t know who Franco Harris was, Freeman trusts you can look it up, whether it’s a retired athlete, an ancient philosopher, or an esoteric word. The poems are better for this restraint when it comes to exposition. They move with more pace from idea to idea, and the juxtapositions pack more punch.

Freeman typically employs medium-long lines, and many poems don’t use stanza breaks. He goes so far as to knock cleverly enjambed lines, reporting that a friend calls them “hangnail stanzas.” The effect is one of greater sincerity and less pretense. What would the drinkers at Bar 342, the Huron River Inn, or Heck’s Bar think of cunning line breaks and brief stanzas affixed to the wrong margin?

What is most consistently on display throughout The Weather of Our Names is Freeman’s wide-ranging curiosity and affection: for the urban and the rural, for plain words and lavish words, for the natural world and for “shot-and-beer” roadhouses, for writers, for sports heroes, for life spent online and life spent before a fire, for his father and the other relatives who are gone, and for the family who remain.