The Same Man by Bobby Elliott

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Bobby Elliott’s The Same Man, selected by Nate Marshall as the winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, focuses on two interwoven narratives, the speaker navigating new parenthood against the backdrop of his complicated relationship with his father. Bold yet subtle, spare yet utterly intense, Elliott demonstrates a sensitivity to the deeply painful, specific, and idiosyncratic nature of family dynamics, a sensitivity that reveals itself in the opening lines of the first poem, “Mondegreen.” Here, the speaker captures the unremitting nature of childhood memory, his father positioned at the center of every wound: 

 

          I mistake the sound of a recycling cart

          hitting the curb

 

          for the latch of our gate

          and picture him instantly:

 

          my father stumbling 

          into the light of the backyard

 

          to shoot himself. 

 

Elliott offers a clear, devastating image of a father set on ending his life, yet this image is also threatened by the questionable means in which it is triggered, the speaker accidentally misinterpreting one sound for another. This instability of perception is a central theme of the collection, the speaker continuously at odds with the complex logic of memory, which is real in its viscerality yet still untrustworthy. Even the most precise details—the cart, the curb, the gate, the latch, the father—fail to account for accuracy, and the speaker is forced to occupy the gulf between what he feels and what he can, or cannot, know.   

 

We learn the father never does shoot himself but that threats of suicide dominate the dynamic between the speaker, the speaker’s sister, and their father, that if it weren’t for his children, the father would certainly have followed through on the act: “…there’s a gun / he’s been holding to his head // and the only reason he’s alive / is the two of us.” In this way, the speaker becomes a tool for survival, caught in the crosshairs of his father’s emotional theater and continually reminded that he is in service of his father’s narrative, that any objection will be swiftly disregarded. In “Harmless,” the father’s refusal to take accountability for his actions or to validate his children’s feelings is on heightened display: “He used to tell us / to visit the Daddy Store // and pick out someone else / if we were so unhappy,” that the fathers of their friends beat their children “…with serving spoons // and the thick / end of pool cues…” and made him look “…if not saintly, harmless / in comparison.” Again, there is a distortion of perception, what the children do feel in disagreement with how they should feel, how the father wants them to feel, the poem, “Gameplan,” culminating with this powerful wisdom: “We are meant to feel loved / by this, not accused.”

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Herein lies the speaker’s aspiration across these poems, to filter out the real feelings amidst the specter of the past, to be as honest and exact as possible. Sometimes this requires the assistance of an outside perspective, obfuscating matters further. In “Redmond Tells Me What I Feel,” a trusted friend pushes the speaker towards clarity, the poem unraveling through a litany of real and imagined difficulties with the father, and Redmond eventually declaring that what the speaker feels “is rage.” At other times, the speaker is clear on his heart, but he is unable to express those feelings or is purposely restrained. In “Prayed For,” as the father presses the speaker on potential baby names, the speaker fantasizes about responding brashly: 

 

          How about 

 

          go fuck yourself? 

          I want to say

 

          before breaking

          his nose and walking out

 

          but don’t. 

 

Throughout the collection, Elliott’s poems offer themselves without flourish, yet they are always emotionally-charged, ready to burst at the seams. The majority are long and slender, comprised mostly of couplets or tercets, with hard end stops that create an eerie suspense, each line a self-contained unit, each line breaking, darkly and severely, into consequence. This feature lends itself to the strange sense of navigation which characterizes the psychic drama of childhood, of walking cautiously through a minefield—that is, the world inherited from the parents—with a heightened sense of danger yet no ability to strategize, only the slow, heavy breaths and the hope that one does not misstep into catastrophe. The use of couplets also captures the interconnectedness of parent and child, the inseparability of their narratives no matter how destructive, and the compactness of feeling, all which carry into adulthood.  

 

By contrast, the speaker’s love for his two sons presents itself as a miraculous version of witness. There is the fear and obligation to protect the children, but the speaker primarily feels gratitude and sheer awe to be their guardian. This is demonstrated most strikingly in the poem, “Lullaby,” which figures as a direct address to his newborn son, the use of the second person enhancing the sense of intimacy as the speaker observes the infant’s half-closed eyes and sings him to sleep, a meditation that drifts into the future, the speaker promising to murmur this lullaby to his son amidst even the worst, most tumultuous times, “even when you’re slamming / your bedroom door or crashing // our only car or calling us / mother fuckers, you beautiful, / beautiful boy.” The doubled “beautiful” is a marvel itself, the father using emphasis, dramatization even, as a quiet vow to never be a wound in the child’s life, to grant him dignity and the right to his feelings. Similarly, in “When I Am Not Thinking of My Father,” this time a direct address to his toddler, the speaker communicates a stunning vision he glimpses of his sons in the rearview mirror while on a drive home: “…our newborn / beside you // in the back seat, / manger of light / in the mirror.” The metaphor, “manger of light,” is extraordinarily moving and imbues the scene with a sense of sacredness and new beginnings, of moving away from a difficult past and into a kinder one. As before, slim, elongated lines characterize these poems, but with such tenderness at play, they unfurl with a gentler breathlessness, time moving ever so swiftly and the speaker wanting to stop it, wanting to savor every moment with his toddler and newborn, to linger in the distinct presence of their glow.    

 

The speaker’s children are quite fond of their grandfather, who, in drawing on the collection’s title, is “the same man” as the speaker’s father, adding a layer of complication to the admixture of emotion already roiling inside him. For example, in “Weekend Getaway,” the speaker’s son is restless for his grandfather to join them for a day at the beach, and all efforts to engage the son in the present moment prove unsuccessful:

 

                    Ocean 

 

          I say and point 

          to the tide making 

 

          and remaking 

          its bed—ocean 

 

          —but he wants 

          his grandfather to say it 

 

          with us, to witness 

          his first wet 

 

          fistful of sand.

 

The son’s sincere pleading for “Papaw” stirs jealousy, confusion, quietude, even empathy within the speaker, forcing him to admit he can no longer pretend to be “…unaware / of my own love // for the same man.” The title’s ability to hold many truths, tenderly and fiercely at once, provides the wisdom and emotional clarity the speaker longs for. The title functions as both question and answer: Can “the same man” who caused such pain be this loved by the speaker’s children? Can “the same man” still hold sway over the adult speaker’s heart? Can “the same man” generate compassion and anger in equal measure? The questions are infinite, but the answer is a singular and decisive yes. Even the speaker represents a version of “the same man,” the boy who once knew love when it was withheld now a man with much love to give. To his sons, his wife, his father, and especially: to himself.