In The End of Childhood, Wayne Miller explores the hopes and realities of both childhood and parenthood in late-stage American capitalism. This is a beautifully designed book by Milkweed Editions that is a pleasure to hold in the hand, its bespoke font design easy to read.
This collection, brimming with lyrical prowess, requires the reader’s attention and thought. The book’s first poem, “Towards a Unified Theory,” is a series of brief snippets that read like tanka or haiku, but focus on singular ideas. For example:
Children
Condemned to live
inside the weather
of our moods.
Joy
What are you doing?
Filling this bucket with water
and dumping it into the water.
Miller continues the poem exploring similar ideas— Death, History, Poetry, Friendship, Pandemic, Myth. Alternates between the big ideas (History, Joy, Poetry, Politics, Myth, etc.) and specific ideas (Pandemic, Zoo, Anatomy Lab, Cataract). As the reader is drawn deeper into the poem, we start to see the unification idea emerge as, for instance, the lines above illustrating Joy resurface in another brief exploration of Poetry and re-emerge to close the poem describing History. This repetition of lines to illuminate separate ideas transcends poetic cleverness and approaches the profound. To make this poem even more engaging, some of these lines refer to earlier lines. For Politics, Miller expounds:
When the plane is going down
all you can do
is hold on
to the thing that’s falling
While later, also examining Politics, he continues:
It’s good to say:
if the plane goes down
the pilots do too
Thinking of these snippets as a whole, the reader is shown, if not true “unification” (he is, as the title suggests, moving “toward” a unified theory), the interconnectedness of ideas. There is so much to unpack in this poem that this review could spend much of its space on the first 22 pages alone, so we will not do that. But this introductory poem establishes a legend the reader can use to navigate the rest of the collection.
Miller examines living in an America where militarism and greed-based commerce control almost every facet of being. He, like many of us of a certain age, was a Cold War child growing up in an America where nuclear war was fully expected. In the poem “The Late Cold War,” Miller begins with the line, “Children, what can I tell you about that time?” but does begin narrating a memory of driving to his father’s home and seeing Klieg lights in the distance.
…and I could see the pale discs of Klieg lights
sweeping across the clouds. I was eight
and terrified the Soviets were invading.
I clutched my backpack full of clothes
in the empty dark of the back seat.
My father, in a moment of pity, assured me
we would drive until we found the source.
It was a car lot having a sale.
In just a few lines, Miller shows the extent of the anxiety inherent in that time, so inherent that an eight-year-old boy’s first thought on seeing spotlights at night brought on an immediate fear of Soviet invasion. The earlier lines in this poem set the scene with details of his parents’ separation, the custody arrangement, his best friend’s brother’s room with posters of nuclear explosions, and bring the reader into these final lines that illustrate what it was to be raised during a time when students had to watch “Duck and Cover” film strips in class.
This poem, like most in this collection, expertly employs sound and rhythm to create both atmospheric tension and narrative pacing. “I clutched my backpack full of clothes” leads to “in the empty dark of the backseat.” One line of perfect iambic tetrameter blending into another four-beat line syncopated by anapests which preserves the narrative tone and provides satisfying rhythmic variances.
One of the longer pieces in this collection, “On Aesthetics,” relates an incident when, at the age of fifteen, the narrator finds himself the object of his father’s friend’s anger over a lack of appreciation for the work of Stan Getz. The father’s friend, “Paul,” a failed musician reduced to teaching in middle schools, like the father, has been drinking all day. He calls the boy vulgar names, yells at him “to stand up and face him,” frightening the boy. Roused by the shouting, the father confronts Paul physically and verbally, telling him to never “talk to his son/ like that, not ever.” What could have been a moment where a father protects his son quickly erodes into stammering sublimation, drunken stumbling, and the father’s eventual inebriated crashing into a coffee table. Paul and the narrator (who, presumably, is the poet) end up rousting the father from the floor and into bed.
…and this is where the boy
wants out, wants to leave,
but there’s no place to go,
he’s still caught in this space,
Stan Getz still playing,
Paul’s saxophone case still open,
the boy notices, beside the table,
and I think this is too much
narrative, too much play-by-play,
which is why I’ve given up
every time I’ve tried to write it
these past fifteen years—
since before my father died—
but now distance
provides a useful objectivity,
so when I watch the boy
lie down beside his father,
finally, in Paul’s bed
I can see the darkness
around them for what it is—
shared breath,
which is what this poem
is made of.
The real power of this piece is how uncomfortable the boy is in this situation: terrified at the drunken and irrational ire of his father’s large adult friend, his father’s drunken defense and stumble, and the boy’s uncomfortable role, trapped in this volatile place caring for a parent behaving as a child.
In these concluding lines, we see the poet engage with both the memory and the poem, trying to frame each in its proper place, something that’s taken decades to achieve. But we also see the nod to the first poem in this collection where he describes love as “We live inside each other’s breath” and children as “Condemned to live// inside the weather/ of our moods.”
The End of Childhood is full of powerful lines. In “The Trucks,” a poem about the vehicles used to transport the thousands of pandemic casualties, Miller begins:
When the trucks no longer
carried bodies
they carried deodorant
Christmas trees
scented candles
sides of beef
Miller uses these lines to explore the idea of the pandemic corpses as, simply, cargo. The reader feels the sheer magnitude of those casualties and how they were refrigerated in trailers before cremation or burial, how those same trailers are backed up behind the local grocery store now.
they pulled away
full of cargo
wrapped and shut
and carefully tracked
we couldn’t wait
to unload them
The poem illustrates how this country’s leadership regarded the pandemic not as a global health emergency, but as an economic disruption, lamenting its effect on stock portfolios and the all-important Gross Domestic Product.
In The End of Childhood, Wayne Miller’s adept, not obvious, application of poetics creates accessible, yet complex, poems that explore, through memory and experience, the sometimes overwhelming angst of living in a time where dystopia looms around every corner, but also provides the gleaming brightness of love, joy, and beauty still present if we can separate from the horror long enough look more closely.
