No family history is simple. All the setbacks, tragedies, slights, betrayals, with hopefully some tenderness, and sometimes all-out warfare: anybody with a family is basically carrying around a book begging to be written. 

And in his seventh poetry collection, Unlooked For, Lex Runciman raises the stakes by tying these pieces of family history to the larger history of humankind. In Runciman’s elegant language and myriad settings, only the thinnest of boundaries separates what an American father was doing in the 1950s and what a Spanish princess was up to in the 1600s, or Emily Dickinson in the 1860s. Most lives, Runciman reminds us again and again, are made of similar elements and moments: relatives, friends, work, joy, sadness, walks. Even lives that are remembered for just a few iconic events—brilliant poems and a famous deathbed, for instance—were in fact made up of the most ordinary stuff in between, just as our lives are now. Without a moment’s snark or judgment, Unlooked For puts all of our lives—all humans—in a continuum to be celebrated. It’s an unusual and moving act of compassion.

The book begins and ends with two poems of chanting—anaphora, repeated phrases—in something close to human song, an ancient way of recording and recalling. In other poems, we see ties to the ancient in glimpses of museums—bones and bog corpses, shoes made thousands of years ago, the Prado, and King Arthur’s Round Table in its modest, touristy hall—“a red eye on the wall.”

Runciman, a retired college professor, knows his canonical English and American writers and has made pilgrimages to their homes, the fields and bridges they set down in their famous lines, and the rooms and rivers they lived and died in. But his poems about these places are both reverential and real: his imagined Keats, if he’d lived to 80, walking through a museum as “A tiny old man, arthritic knees” in “Keats” or, in his poem “‘Life is, Soberly and Accurately, the Oddest Affair,’” the sweet banality of taking the full Virginia Woolf tour with “food at the one pub there,” “And last, resolved / to better get thought and feeling right, / we walked the stubble fields back.”

Many poems in the book recall the cadences and elegant sentence structures of classic English poets. But these poems are also firmly rooted in the modern day, as in “Winter in the Pandemic Years,” with its first line, “Even as we are each to each made alien,” seemingly copped right out of a Shakespeare sonnet. Others read as if a 19^th-century poet were writing science fiction, a wonderfully refreshing mix. The pandemic poem is followed by one of the most poignant in the book, “Reading the Autobiography of William Carlos Williams,” which reminds us that Williams worked as a family doctor during the last pandemic, the great flu of 1918. Here Runciman comes full circle with a 21st-century poem of asymmetrical stanzas and modern syntax, describing the days of a poet 100 years earlier:

…Williams makes house calls,
60 a day, if we can believe him—strep, croup,
mostly flu, a killer traveling, he half thinks,
in his own instrument bag.

Then, a few pages later, is “Loving Beer,” one of the powerful family poems that tie this collection together. This is Runciman mixing up modern and classic syntax from the start: “This night one for thirst. / And this night one against regret. / And this tomorrow for the crescent spirea.” Then a scene of a family working in the yard, a single bottle of beer, and more glorious details: “only that lager and hop / sweet bitterness of stolen, quick gulps.” And then the last musical stanza comes, but with a punch:

One last now for shears and rakes
And wooden-handled trowels set down,
And leather, sweat-soaked gloves
Drying in the shape of hands.

Here again are humans passing through, temporary, but leaving their mark, a sort of museum piece that future generations will use to puzzle together who we were.

Almost exactly halfway through the book is “Neap Tide,” a crucial poem that starts with a death, a preoccupying grief, “it would neither be shed nor shifted / as a suitcase is set down and picked up again / with the other hand.” Eventually we learn that the departed was a sibling, “the coats on our backs a cousin’s, then mine, then his, / all of them gray.” And then this vital passage:

His grin, that happiness,
its brevity—as adults, we hardly spoke.
Adopted (we had that in common),
no one mistook us for brothers.

And the poem ends with a Frost echo: “no language fixes nor beauty stays.” This poem tells volumes in its one page, each short brushstroke phrase standing in for all that isn’t said, by the poet and between these two boys, and later, men. After images in earlier poems of a mother and father sometimes struggling, often drinking, “Neap Tide” is the one that places the speaker in the family at last. This is what it was like, it says. This is how it continues to be. Again, the continuum of history, but now this small family has their place in it.

Part of the book’s beauty is that there’s almost no “I” in it, although much of it is about memory and recollection. Runciman deftly steps aside; the speaker is there all through, narrating, but the story both is and isn’t that of the person himself. The book keeps looping back around to say we are the world; we are not just in it.

Lex Runciman’s body of work over the past 40-plus years has put him into the category of essential Oregon poets, honored by the late Erik Muller (a fine Oregon poet himself) in his excellent 2017 book of critical essays, Durable Goods: Appreciations of Oregon Poets. The cover image of Unlooked For is Oregonian too, featuring an exquisite work by poet and visual artist Sam Roxas-Chua of Eugene. But it’s fitting that the book found an overseas publisher, Salmon Poetry of Ireland, as a home for its poems that fold, again and again, history and the world into the nearness of a single life.

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