The memories of a lifetime — many related to fathers and love — collide forcefully in Mike Schneider’s new poetry collection, “Spring Mills.” Mr. Schneider grew up in the rural, central-Pa. town of the title but has lived in Pittsburgh for years. He is connected to both the Squirrel Hill and East End Poets’ groups, the latter of which he founded in 2010.
The book chronicles a sensitive traveler through a long and varied life. It begins in “Spring Mills”, the title poem, set on Memorial Day 1943, several years before the poet’s birth — “At 17 my father had a silver cornet / & blue light stirred behind his eyes.” This silver and blue hope morphs into a darkened ending, which has a red-winged blackbird screeching, “…epaulets flashing scarlet / as it flaps across the creek to the ballfield / like a young man crossing the sea to war.”
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Fast-forward to the early ’60s, and “The Car Window”; the poet remembers being 12, with the car “window-wing / open…,” cold November air rushing into the backseat. His 7-year-old brother complains, but he “doesn’t know the drill. The old / man’s at the wheel. Pull up the blanket, / shut your mouth. Hold on tight to dreams.” An age-old battle is revisited — youthful energy and endurance in the face of old, toughened intransigency. The poem is dedicated to his father, and the reader is left with the nagging notion that there are no true winners and losers, but just survivors — and creators.
In “Old Blue Volvo,” Mr. Schneider’s daughter learns to drive, rekindling memories of the poet’s father’s love for “the ’48 half-ton / he found for a few bucks.” This comes with the sad realization that he “Loved me too, / though he couldn’t say it.” But, in the Volvo with his daughter, he finds “this strange voice on my tongue. / Let it up till it grabs, then feather it./ Easy. That’s the way.” Here we see the poet speaking as a father, recognizing it as perhaps an unconscious channeling of his own father’s way of caring.
Ultimately, a car and its clutch become a metaphor for a headstrong attitude toward life. But though the “engine’s roar” produces “raw joy,” it also must pull “deep / into the furnace of itself / to charge uphill / like a young man / propelling himself into the world.” Schneider’s father was both forceful and distant, and the poet captures this by projecting both inner and outer existential energy. The self is a “furnace” and life requires throwing oneself into the world echoes of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.
The poet’s father mixes his old-school attitude with emotion in “The Licking,” where, as he administers the corporal punishment and the poet sobs, he chokes up and croaks, “This hurts me more than you.” The son shows, even then, a poet’s sense of irony in the midst of pain — “yes boss. I love you too.” The irony is even thicker in the poem’s final line, as the idea of the “happily-ever-afters never ending” leaves the reader agape at the writer’s deep sense of pain, well beyond just the physical. The poem renders the force, and ultimate disconnect, that can result from corporal punishment.
Mr. Schneider also reflects on love. In the incantatory “The Trouble With Love,” said trouble, in the words of a friend, “takes you / where your mother said / Don’t go. And your father / went & came home / begging forgiveness.” But by the end it’s a circle, as “under a flat stone, you find / a note you once wrote to yourself. / It says, The trouble with love.” The Sartrean energy becomes cyclical, and cynical, here, but no less existential, reminding us more of the tragic hero in Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” this time.
Mr. Schneider is searching for peace and calm but often admits it can only be tangled up with hurtling and heartache. And hardness. “Fastball Shy,” an otherwise simple ode to Little League baseball, ends with the poet and his friends unraveling a ball, “yards / & yards of yarn down / to the inscrutable rubber / pill, unforgiving hard / center of the world.” For this poet, the center will hold — unforgiving and hard, but existent and stable. That he connects all these things, through pain and joy, to having and being a father, is the unforgettable upshot of Schneider’s panoramic “Spring Mills.”
Gary Ciocco is a traveling philosophy professor and poet who lives south of Pittsburgh.
First Published: June 17, 2023, 9:30 a.m.