In “Big Wave Surfer,” one of the most striking poems in Bobby Elliott’s The Same Man, the subject of a documentary attempts to ride a 100-foot swell. It’s a film about the wildness of nature, the tenacity of humans—but the speaker can only see it as the story of a father leaving his kids to move to Portugal. The footage of the Atlantic hurling itself into Nazaré is almost enough to make you understand his choices, Elliott tells us. Almost. 

But this is a speaker who has felt the emotional absence of his own father and who, given his father’s suicidal ideation, lives with the abiding specter of future absence. So he can’t look past what the surfer has done. I sense, however, that he might envy him, just a little, when he notes that the man, who has a new partner and a new baby, is finally ready to change diapers, “to make it look / effortless and humble, / like muscle memory” (36). The speaker, a new father himself, lacks that kind of assuredness. He has no model for a fatherhood that’s easy and instinctual. 

The Same Man seeks to make peace with that lack. It is artfully honest about the tumultuous relationship between speaker and father and isn’t precious about their imperfect and somewhat tenuous reconciliation. We also see the speaker’s approach to fatherhood presented in contrast to the parenting he received. The father berates the speaker’s mother; the speaker and his partner hold each other in the kitchen so their son can see. The speaker cradles his son skin-to-skin knowing that his own father “hugs [him] / just to get it over with” (51). And while the speaker’s childhood seems marked by anger and instability, he resolves in “Lullaby” to respond to his son with gentleness: 

                         even when you’re 
                         deep into your adolescence

                         and plotting your escape,
                         even when you’re slamming
                         your bedroom door or crashing

                         our only car or calling us
                         motherfuckers, you beautiful,
                         beautiful boy. (28)

How many parents, though, in the dark and the quiet, make a similar pledge? To love without reservation. To let devotion nullify rage. This speaker is an idealist, to be sure, but as a reader I accept his idealism because it comes with a measure of self-awareness. Earlier in “Lullaby”, for instance, he looks into his son’s eyes “to make up for all the moons / I’ve missed” (28). He knows he should have stopped to appreciate the moon—and yet he didn’t. I take this as quiet acknowledgement that he may again, someday, fail to do as he should. 

The question of the degree to which we can trust ourselves as parents underpins this collection. In “Mondegreen,” the opening poem, the speaker notes,

                                                       how lost 
                          you’d have to be 

                         to believe you knew 
                         everything there was to know

                         about yourself. (3-4)

This is offered in reference to his father’s contemplation of suicide, but the suggestion that we can never fully understand ourselves presents implications for parenting as well. You believe yourself capable of loving your child through any situation. But is it true?

The book’s title poem, which appears late in the collection, also considers capability and emotional capacity, describing how the speaker’s father has failed his children in significant ways but delights the speaker’s son, “like he was born // to disappoint everyone / but his grandchildren” (59). It’s a poem that addresses one person’s complexities—that the same man can be both generous with and withholding of affection—but it also contains the speaker’s whispered doubt: Could I become the same man my father is? Will I, heavy with gratitude and good intentions, always be the same as I am today? 

Like the speaker, we can’t know the answer. But this is a collection that places hope alongside hurt, as in the poem “What We See Together,” which lists with tender precision what the father and child observe on a walk. A statue of St. Francis, who believed all living creatures deserve care. A painter “in her studio unknown / and painting” (52). As they return home, “our overgrown plum trees / always with more fruit” (53). The phrase what we see together moves beyond the literal to suggest that this new father-and-son pair—and the readers, if we want to—can perceive the world through a lens of possibility. Elliott’s list is as lovely a benediction as I can think of: that we might go forward, noticing care and attention and the kind of sweetness that sustains.