Reluctant Care by Michael McDermott

This cohesive, can’t-put-it-down collection is a must-read for anyone who ever has or ever will be a care-giver. As the poet contemplates his aging father “in anger and wonder,” you will read these swiftly moving poems about a decade of “reluctant care” with a parallel emotional complexity. Honest, wry, and wide-ranging, this story in verse sketches not only an unromanticized portrait of the anxieties and surprises of elder-care, but also the portrait of a very specific person, once bedecked with Air Force medals, adept at boogie-woogie on the piano, now falling to weakness and pain. The poet’s care and ambivalence are both brilliantly rendered, with not a stitch of self-congratulation. Our helplessness in the face of our parents’ weakness is explored on multiple levels, for McDermott shows that we witness them dying as they have lived, for better and for (sometimes much) worse. The reader will see heroism in the speaker’s patience and kindness, though the poet asks for no congratulations, but works to present only the honest truth. Dad drank. He probably could have saved Mom. He’s selfish. Maybe he can’t even love. Maybe his death is his own fault. And maybe even so he should not have to die like this. Pain is still a horror. Love still better than no love. There is nothing sentimental here, and as the poet uses form to connect these vignettes to the history of poetry (arguably our best legacy and greatest shared heritage), the personal experiences of this father-son pair open to something larger, to the way our species triumphs precisely because we can rise above our flaws, we can love and serve one another in spite of them.

–Nancy White, author of Sun, Moon, Salt

“First there was the time before Mom died/Then there was the time after Mom died.” These two lines from “Washington Hospital Center: Burn Unit,” the sonnet sequence that opens Reluctant Care, sum up the bleak, sorrowful power of Michael McDermott’s book. In painstaking, often painful detail, McDermott records first the sudden, horrible death of his mother, then the long, slow decline of his father.  He finds the poignancy and rueful humor in an out-of-sequence remote control, a pile of old magazines, the difficulty in helping his mobility-impaired father take a shower.  By presenting the particular tragedy within his own family, McDermott has delved into universal themes and created a book that should prove durable.”

–Miles David Moore, author of Roller Coaster and The Bears of Paris