Book Synopsis

In FLIGHT RECORD, Bruce McIntosh takes the reader on a poetic journey, a saga in verse, weaving a bittersweet story of a son's experiences with his airline pilot father. It starts with a child's point-of-view overlaid with the grown man's perspective, a melding of innocence and experience. The perspective shifts as the author grows, and moves through awe and admiration, despair and anger, longing, love, and understanding. These poems give us vivid glimpses of moments in time. Like a worn family photo album, snapshots from the past build upon each other to form a moving saga told with heart, empathy, and pathos. Memories are distilled into perfectly crafted tableaux that allow emotions to pass through to us. The delicately drawn specifics ground us in a time and place and emotional truths that are at once personal and universal, epic and mundane. This is not a memoir, but a vivid, moving, verse-memorial to a father.

Review Quotes

"McIntosh offers an intense and complicated poetic memorial to his late father. The wistful, nostalgic aspect of this collection can't be overstated; McIntosh takes readers back to a simpler, or perhaps more naïve time with numerous references that make the 1960s and '70s setting come alive, from rotary phones to Ovaltine... A highly recommended set of poems by an author unpacking a troubled relationship with a parent." - Kirkus Reviews