Describing Michael Lauchlan as a Detroit poet from a working-class background makes the comparison to Philip Levine immediate and inevitable. Like Levine, he started working blue-collar jobs that “carve themselves into us” young, and it’s evident from his writing that he, too, knows what work is and what it can cost us.
Unlike Levine, Lauchlan remained in Detroit. He has lived, worked, taught, and raised his family in the city and its near-orbit his whole life, standing in that “horizontal snow / [that] seems to carry metal shavings” through great arcs of history and several boom-and-bust iterations. His fourth and latest volume of poetry, Running Lights, still inhabits that geography; but as the city transforms yet again, so does his scope. Lauchlan is still a Detroit poet, but this book takes us far beyond the city and surrounding landscape.
He declares in the volume’s opening poem, “Unfinished Ars,” that in the past he wanted to write “poems with sharp endings, closing arguments / that would finally convict the cruel.” Justice demands closure, but he’s no longer interested in fashioning those steel-jawed traps. We see him move away from that desire for a final accounting toward the unfinished business of mercy in the structure of his work. In these poems, he acknowledges that “mercy silvers through time, right / alongside the butchery and even God / can’t untangle them.” He moves away from resolution and toward ambiguity. Now he wants to write “poems no one ever finishes.”
Lauchlan’s previous book, Trumbull Ave. (Wayne State University Press, 2015), was an expert excavation of personal, familial, and cultural stories rooted in a specific place. Its poems feel like the layers in a sample taken from a glacier or the rings you see in the stump of a cut tree. We’re standing on Trumbull Avenue in Detroit with the poet, traveling backward through recent history.
In contrast, Running Lights’ poems tend to start solidly on the page and then open “like train windows” to let in the wider world— and sometimes even the universe. Now in a later phase of his life, he’s expanding his gaze across timelines and into the future. Poems start out grounded in narrative moments like walking the dog or cleaning up storm debris, like in “After the Windstorm”:
Chainsaw in hand, I find myself
endeavoring to cut the present moment
away from the past
Then suddenly— like the treescape— the poem opens, allowing “hibiscus blooms [to] turn / toward the east the open sky the sun.”
The poem “Notes on Memory” shows how Lauchlan opens the poem and widens the scope, with his deft maneuvering through a span of millenia in one page. Its opening line, “A small muscle in my dog’s brow / unwolfs her,” takes us from the speaker’s house to 40,000 years ago. The next stanza takes us to his father’s dim kitchen, and then we move through meditations on how memory and desire form the self, and the difficulty of “returning to places that shined…after hope is scrubbed out.”
Time is the central rumination in this collection, and Lauchlan braids it both philosophically and physically through almost every poem— mercy as an intervention in time, watching from patios as “days parade past,” or documenting the marble “art museum stairs…thinking of shoes that scuffed them, until they curve just so.”
“The Rate” refers to the speed of species extinction, the pattern of quakes on the Ring of Fire and respiration, and asks, “what’s not a form of timekeeping?” Then he brings us seamlessly down to earth as he walks his dog past an oak that “hums in its hundred rings.” Finally, in the same poem, we travel from deep time and underground seismic activity to the near future with a gorgeous and specific image of garbage day on Lauchlan’s street:
tomorrow at ten,
as if to weigh what we’ve shed,
a truck will extend its iron arm
as our granddaughter, bathed
in light, watches from a window.
In another poem, “someone is trying to explain / relativity to [him] again” (which Lauchlan says he’s “not drunk enough” to talk about). He says “a hundred years / after Einstein, you might think / we all understand time, / its pliant sinews, the personal clock / by which we gauge our passage.” Not the case, however. We’re all still baffled, wondering “where’s my old self, voracious for the wide world?”
In “World News Tonight” we find ourselves following the poet’s speaker out of the snow and through ordinary doorways that smell of leather and frying onions, as he slips “out of wet shoes and enter[s] / a dream past which is not / only mine…”:
The tale’s more
than one family’s wars, trials
and steerage births. This frozen night
joins with other nights…
Time has “lost its edges,” and the poem opens up from the solid street beneath his feet into the borderless, collective unconscious.
“Peripatetic” nests three timescales inside each other: evolutionary and geological time with humans emerging from the Rift Valley, the personal past of a 20th century Detroit childhood, and a romantic memory of searching for a restaurant as an adult. The act of walking becomes the thread connecting the eras, and the poem ends on a memory of his wife’s “face like a clearing sky.” Lauchlan is at his very best when using time to frame his long marriage to his wife, Deb McEvoy. “Wind” is a perfect love poem that captures the bittersweet spirit and details of a couple’s decades together. It opens with a memory of them in an unfinished attic bedroom, kept awake by the snap of Visqueen in a storm. Their aging bodies in the present, with restless legs and nocturnal worries, act as timekeepers. Though the poet loves the life they’ve made, he also longs to restart:
to crawl back in time
to wait near windows on a haloed street
while blankets rise and fall and rise.
A few of his love poems go beyond layering time and consider alternate forking timelines. “Just Imagine How” traces all the ways the speaker and his wife might have missed each other, and all the choices they’ve made that bring them to now. There’s awe and gratitude and tenderness in his address. The theme of mercy reappears as he considers the timeline-altering choices she made: “How many times / did you decide to split, only to choose to stay / without ever saying a word? Please / don’t feel you need to tell me.”
“Thinking of Wormholes” is almost the same poem written differently, and a case could be made that it’s the collection’s thesis statement. The pure pondering of the nature of time, the grounded physicality of the poet repairing a leaky bathroom, openness to wonder, humility, humor, and— of course— the great “cosmic clock” timing his relationship with Deb.
There’s a moment in the poem where he observes that “particles of the past change each time we visit them.” It’s a compressed statement of poetics that describes what Lauchlan has been doing across his career and what he does with increasing ambition and expansiveness in this book.
In “Laughter,” Lauchlan writes that he “loved to wrestle a day / to its blazing end and then / longed to hold you by the waist/ as dusk held the horizon.” The image is physically grounded and cosmically scaled at the same time: the small gesture suddenly opens a large window and two ordinary people become a love story for the ages.
Lauchlan is a narrative lyric poet, but this book moves toward a more meditative style. He anchors his poems with a scene or memory but then layers on images and temporal leaps and shifts like papier-mâché on an armature. The story often dissolves so the poem can expand and the reader is left with its emotional residue.
Most of the poems in Running Lights are one-pagers, and he chooses to write variations on ideas in separate poems rather than long, multi-section poems. Though his style is contemplative and roaming, his lines and language are compressed and only a few poems reach two full pages.
While he comes from Philip Levine’s plainspoken Rust Belt lit lineage, Lauchlan can stop you in your tracks with beautiful language and imagery: “geese pull / behind them broad wakes / which melt back into a hush / older than the lines on our maps,” “the trees’ one sentence breathes / from a thousand greening limbs,” and, “the soughing of wind over grass / was heard by the grass.”
Lauchlan retains a working-class grounding that keeps the beauty honest. He addresses the same social and political concerns as Levine in poems like “Road to Jackson” and “The Old Heavy,” and mentions figures like Woody Guthrie and Paul Robeson. But he writes with less anger and more elegy (though without nostalgia); in poems like “Old Oaks” and “Waning Gibbous” a gentle and conspiratorial sense of humor glimmers. There’s a tempered urgency and muscular humility to his work: he’s “drawn across the horizon / while scouring a burnt pan, being / one who scrubs and fears and hopes.”
Lauchlan’s closest “literary cousin” in the Levine/Rust Belt lit tradition might be Jim Daniels. Born in the same city and generation, they share similar biographies and subject matter. Daniels has created a body of work that is quite populated and social with a more narrative core. Lauchlan’s poems (while populated to a degree) tend to be more solitary— the body alone in a landscape or chance encounters with neighbors while meditating on time and gravity.
Admirers of Levine’s contemporary James Wright might see echoes of his work in Lauchlan’s poetry as well. The world around them is failing but they observe it compassionately and manage to find it beautiful anyway. Wright seems to want to dissolve, but Lauchlan is working toward becoming permeable, not invisible— opening up to let the world and time move through him.
The last section of the book, titled “Freighted,” hits us with the effects of gravity after flowing through the first three sections. Time, which spun outward into universal scale and alternate timelines in earlier poems, is now burdened and slowed. “Like a Song” and “Gravity” are both poems about manual labor done at great heights that result in literal falls. “Gates,” “Fulcrum,” and “Fact” are also tactile and grounded poems about the mechanics of work. The word “freighted” is laden with cargo and with meaning.
Lauchlan also carries the freight of the literary tradition he inhabits, and he honors it throughout the book. In poems like “One Taught Me” and “You Ask Me to Read Joyce in a Bar,” he acknowledges what he owes other writers, his family, and community. Two poems near the book’s close, “The Empty Bus” and “Recall,” extend that gratitude into a poet taking stock, freighted with love for the work and the people who made him. Those two poems, along with the adjacent “Late Lyric,” combine for an emotional ending. Any of the three could hold up the ending on their own, and together they are a grand finale. We’ve awakened, with the poet, “on a bus in a strange town,” and now we can “disembark / to walk into a world [we] love.”
With characteristic self-deprecation, he reminds us that “what I’m doing is nothing new, / nothing new at all.” His desire to make “poems no one will finish” is a realization that while he may not have changed the world, he’s opened the doors and “train windows” for countless others so that they may do so. He hopes they’ll be able to do “work that takes them so far away / they never think to return.”
Running Lights, with its two nearly opposite meanings in relation to time, is an apt title for this collection. Reckless drivers running red lights feel they’re not subject to rules or constraints, or that their urgency, like speeding to a hospital, allows for override. Conversely, a vehicle’s running lights are used for safety when moving or to indicate a car is idling in place. They’re not headlights illuminating the road ahead: they’re a signal to others of a vehicle’s position, speed and direction in the dark, and how it’s moving through space.
While this collection isn’t reckless and doesn’t break rules, it does show a poet who is rising above the constraints of the calendar and considering his place in the unfathomable span of deep time. It’s aware of the harm we can do others with carelessness, and how “accidents” or chance encounters can alter one’s course profoundly.
This book also reflects the in-between, out-of-time waiting we do in our cars. Running Lights feels benevolently vigilant, with text-me-when-you-get-there energy: the friend waiting in the driveway to make sure you get in safely, or the parents’ cars sitting in the dark parking lot waiting for the bus to return from a night game.
Ultimately, what we’re left with is not a closing argument, a conviction, or the steel-jawed trap Lauchlan once wanted to set. It’s a single sentence breathing “from a thousand greening limbs,” not finished and not meant to be. It’s lights left on for everyone moving through the dark— toward whatever comes next.
