Less Fortunate Pirates: Poems from the First Year Without My Father by Bryan Borland

Less Fortunate Pirates: Poems from the First Year Without My Father Reviews

• 
  BookChampions

  Bryan Borland is one of my favourite poets, and with this collection, I've now read his entire published oeuvre. This is a painful, tragic, and heart-rendering read, one a started a couple times this year but didn't feel ready to read. The collection is a series of chronological poems written throughout the year after Borland's father drove his car off a small, one-lane bridge. I can see how these poems could bring tremendous solace to someone who is struggling with the death of a loved one, but especially a parent.
  
  In a moment of serendipity, we ended up finally watching the series finale of #transparent last night, which deals with Maura's death and the huge ripples that it has on the family. It's a single, 100-minute long episode, which is (oddly?) framed as a musical with original songs written by the sister of Jill Soloway, the show's creator. It was kinda of a beautiful mess, but it was a perfect catharsis after finishing *Less Fortunate Pirates*. It's really worth a watch.
  
  I hear many people speak of poetry as "too abstract" or "too difficult to understand"--even other English teachers. I could hand them this book and easily prove them wrong. This book responds energetically to that gorgeous dictum and challenge from William Carlos Williams: "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." The news from these poems goes right into the heart.
  
  And I'll be using the poem "The Fourth of July" as my next written prompt for my high school freshmen.
• 
  Tabitha Dial

  Perfect read for anyone experiencing loss. Crisp, clever, easy to relate to.
  
  Another uncomplicated poetry book that offers raw experience: realistic and emotional.
• 
  Telly

  "Less Fortunate Pirates" was a difficult read. Page-after-page is heart wrenching, so much so that I had to take several breaks from reading it. Upon completing it, I had to go back and reread it twice more, just to allow myself to be fully immersed in the fluid poems that Bryan Borland has woven together.
  
  While reading the book, I could only think of the inevitable "what if," that time that assuredly will come when I join the "old soldiers" that Borland writes about in "Long Division." I've long wondered how we move beyond insurmountable holidays, like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and, the most likely to be dreaded, Father's Day, when a father dies. How do we ease back into a life that includes bohemian sex, cussing out the drivers in front of us, and any other long list of behaviors of which our living fathers would disapprove but, in the spirit world, perhaps witness on a daily basis? These are the things I've thought about, and I haven't lost a parent yet; so, reading about Borland's struggle was eerily familiar, if not foretelling.
  
  Filial loss isn't easy, and reading this chapbook wasn't either. For me, it almost felt personal. My father will be 63 this year, the same age at which his own father passed away in November 1993, just a week before Thanksgiving. My dad struggled with his own father's death and now reminds us, whenever I am two hours south and visiting, that his days are numbered. Sixty-three years of age must be foreboding for him, and so he has started to speak like a prophet, sometimes making me wonder if he doesn't have some terminal illness which he's managed to keep secret, one in which he knows the date of death but keeps it guarded close to his chest. When he talks, he offers life lessons, reminds me that he loves me, and seems to be aging before my very eyes with every word he breathes; the look in his face when he pauses to make sure his words have registered is aching because it is foretelling, and so I strive to remember everything he says just as he strives to make sure I've understood them.
  
  Perhaps this personal issue made it a bad time to read "Less Fortunate Pirates," but this is also precisely why it was one of the best things I have read. I'm glad I did. Emotions haphazardly shared never make great art, but Borland's intimate confessional collection of poetry strives to help us not so much understand his loss, but, rather, our own losses, which is why I probably needed to read this book.
  
  By being both personal yet universal, Borland manages to transcend prosaic art. Many of the poems, such as "The Year of Coincidences and Synchronicities," "The Day I Break the First Commandment," "The Day I Return to My Wonton Ways," "Dream Journal, 26 December," or "On Being Intimate in the Company of Ghosts," cope with death and subsequent grief while remaining acutely aware of life and lives that continue to go around those who are bereaved. These poems celebrate life as much as they bemoan the loss of a father. It's a shame it took me three full reads to overcome my own idiosyncrasy and realize these are not necessarily troublesome poems meant to laden the heart. In fact, they are quite the opposite.
  
  As I reread "The Morning I Read Whitman to Three Hundred People," I paused to think what poem I might read at my own father's funeral, just as I did at his father's funeral. It was questions like this that arose from poems such as this one that caused me to sit "Less Fortunate Pirates" down and stop reading it. When I returned and completed it, the answer came to me. I hope it might be many, many decades away, but I know I have found the answer, only a few pages later, with Borland's "Introducing a Grandson to His Grandfather."
  
  For a father who hasn't yet passed away, the similarities lurking in "Less Fortunate Pirates" were uncanny: Being two hours north of my parents, worrying about what my mother would do if my father precedes her in death, having a nephew named Noah, the relatable small town cadence that creeps onto almost every page felt too familiar and was all a little overwhelming. Yet, that's just the thing: Death is universal.
  
  We may not all have nephews named Noah or parents that live two hours south of us, but we can all, or at some will be able to, relate to the fact that death is imminent and always paradoxically brought on by life. It is this collection of poems reading like prophesy that unwrap this message and can help us prepare ourselves for what we must some day face. Thankfully, we have "Less Fortunate Pirates." What Borland has given us is not a mere collection of beautifully written poems inspired by tragedy, but a guide for grief, a manual for mourning. It is nothing less then a field guide, as his first poem states, "on how to approach the bereaved," even if it is someday us that we must approach.
• 
  Grady

  The Essence of Filial Grieving
  
  For some years now Bryan Borland has been writing courageous poetry, poems that deal with his sensibilities as a man who is able to communicate to everyone fortunate to come upon his writing the surges of fear and of desire and of love and of hurt that accompany the path of self realization and acceptance of being a gay man in a world that is slowly growing into acceptance of sexual variations. Many writers who share like thoughts have centered blame for lack of acceptance on parents, especially fathers. Bryan Borland has never walked that path and now we understand more fully why. Bryan's father Jimmy died in December 2009 leaving his son with not only the warmth of memories of being loved but also with the seed money that allowed Bryan to follow his dream of becoming a publisher. Acceptance, gratitude, respect and longing filled that first year after his father's accidental death and it is those feelings made as poems that Bryan share in this gentle farewell homage to his father and the legacy he allowed to happen.
  
  WHAT I WANT YOU TO KNOW
  We are lucky.
  We have mapped our survival
  like fortunate pirates.
  
  We have found him in treasure unexpected:
  an inherited kitten,
  the swale of farmland.
  
  We miss him with a terrible ache
  but our lives have fallen back
  to the amber grass like leaves tossed in the air.
  
  We've learned taxes and mechanics,
  the things made larger
  in the sudden absence of a good father.
  
  I asked him
  two weeks before he died
  What would I do without you?
  
  He said
  You'd be okay.
  
  And it is to Bryan Borland's credit and sensitivity to the life his father appreciated that he includes moments in which he shares his grief with his life partner:
  
  MY COMPANION PIECE
  At the funeral
  they called him my companion,
  which made him sound less
  like my husband than my pet,
  my friend with the furry belly
  I instinctively rub. These two weeks
  he's been the guide dog
  to my blindness. I'd have run
  off bridges too
  if not for his steady hands
  as buffers, his muscular arms
  when I wake up too early,
  and we cry,
  but together.
  
  THE DAY I RETURN TO MY WANTON WAYS
  The transcendence does not last
  forever. I am human, after all,
  and I sink into childish behavior,
  impatience, impurity, the colors
  of the rainbow I'd prefer him not to see.
  I curse slow drivers. I masturbate. I fail
  to appreciate the things to which I clung
  for warmth in winter. There are days
  I do not fell him, when my ego
  burns his wings. There are minutes
  I forget. When I remember to respect
  my grief, I am the prodigal son,
  but each time I return, I've moved
  farther from him. When a beloved dies,
  we wrap them in shrouds of our skin.
  Death strips us of the bullshit.
  It is life that brings us back.
  
  There are few authors and fewer poets who have left such eloquent elegies for the passing of their fathers as has Bryan Borland. But less the reader thinks this collection of poems may be morbid or consistently sad be assured that as in all of Borland's writing there is light, there is unexpected joy, there is love, and there is a profound caring about those around him. And he has the gift to make us, his readers, those around him. Utterly beautiful, these poems, this remembrance.
  
  Grady Harp
• 
  Collin Kelley

  If you've lost a parent – especially a father – this collection of poems will be a difficult, yet cathartic read. Bryan chronicles how his life changed in the year after his father was killed in a car crash. With no witnesses or explanation, Bryan's father's SUV went off a bridge and into a lake. Was it suicide or an accident? These questions are mulled as grief and memories manifest in unlikely places (watching the movie Inception, for instance), visiting the site of the accident and, ultimately, remembering his father's kindness rather than dwelling on his death. In the intervening months, there is also a stark and true account of how we privately deal with grief: hoping the approaching mourners won't ask if there is anything they can do to help (they can't), posting the news on Facebook (the social media obituary), indulging in inappropriate laughter, dealing with holidays (especially Father's Day) and reclaiming intimacy. I lost my own father in the spring, and I waited until summer to read this collection – to put some distance between my grief before delving into Bryan's. The collection has since become my bible as I begin to write about my losing my dad. I know Bryan's father would be proud of all the things he has accomplished as publisher of Sibling Rivalry Press, and I also know that his father would be honored by the moving, life-affirming tribute that is Less Fortunate Pirates.
  
• 
  Hugh

  I was as affected by this striking treatise on grief as much as I was by Bryan Borland's other poetry collection "My Life as Adam".
  
  You don't realize how much a person means to you until they are gone. The poems in "Less Fortunate Pirates" are attentive to the occurrences in life, whether major or minutiae of life, that are bent out of place or become hyper-perceptible because a person is not there to be a part of them.
  
  You don't remember a person as much as you do when memories are all that is left of someone. Bryan Borland remembers not just with a sense of loss, but also with gratitude for what he has had.
  
  This book did not engender pity from me but my own gratitude for being shown in crisp detail the meaning of a person in one's life.
• 
  willowdog

  Well-written poems written after the accidental death of Borland's father.