Poets are longitudinal recorders, capturing the contours of the world in words. This is true of Michael Whitt in his latest collection of poetry, “Hawk on Galvez: A Lament,” a monumental work largely written while he was a medical student in Galveston, Texas in the 1960s.

The compendium is a palimpsest, where traces of experiences, both his and others’, are seen simultaneously: a father-and-son trip across Texas in 1964, a Whitmanesque journey down New York City’s East River in 1966, the People’s Park march in Berkeley in 1969, Amanda Gorman’s stirring address on Inauguration Day 2021. Many poems were written while the artist, now 88, was a young man first discovering his country’s ugly underbelly, and only much later returned to, viewed in the light of a life lived.

A West Marin country doctor for four decades, Dr. Whitt was born in Little Rock to Ruth Sturgeon and Carter Whitt, a cash register salesman. He studied petroleum engineering in college before heading to Berkeley in 1959—a sharp left turn in both geography and spirit. “That’s where I got civilized,” he said, alluding to the literature and philosophy courses that reshaped his worldview.

Military service soon sent him to Germany, where he endured the drudgery of marching drills by memorizing poems by Eliot, Yeats, Stevens and Baudelaire. When he returned, he chose medical school over his love for letters. “I didn’t want to just be an onlooker in life,” he said, “I wanted to be an actor.”

During his first year of school, his father took his own life. In his grief, Dr. Whitt found his voice. “He may know not what he knows, but he knows not grief,” he said on a recent evening in his Inverness home, quoting Yeats. “That was me. I didn’t know what I knew, and I certainly didn’t know grief, but I quickly found out all about it.”

“Hawk on Galvez” thus spans some 60 years of personal and cultural observations, forming a usable creed out of the near at hand: a nation’s mythmaking, the enduring brutality of American racism, the limits of nostalgia. In the collection’s titular poem, the natural world is described with thrilling clarity:

“Errant weather/of early spring/deserted seashore/black-hooded gulls flying/laughing in the wind/wind-blown sand/gray-matter of cloud/the myth of Mankind/in the back of my own mind.”

Some poems have the lilt of a lullaby; most seem to deliver their morals in unambiguous terms as he evokes the troubled world with alacrity. “If God was pronounced dead, what kind of effect does that have on society as a whole?” he asks. “What becomes of our need for reverence?”

Such questions echo through his work, where old rituals and beliefs dissolve into new, uncertain forms: “In history’s hand me down, every/culture had an otherworldly presence/to confer blessings, absorb loss./What better bonds men/than service to a supreme being—/and a common enemy?/Is it the bond that secures a culture/one that highjacks human nature/or because they didn’t know better?”

This stanza had not yet formed when he penned the poem in 1966. “I’m a combination of the places I’ve been and all the hills I’ve hiked,” he said.

His poetry is no different. “Hawk on Galvez” is a record of voices across time, a poet’s lament for America’s strange land.

On Saturday, March 22 at 2 p.m., Michael Whitt will read from his book at the Dance Palace, joined by friends Gene Ptak, Matt Gallagher and others. 

Listen to Michael Whitt read an exert from his poem “Hawk on Galvez” below.