The Art of the Lathe [Paperback]

B.H. Fairchild (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2002

B.H. Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe is a collection of poems centering on the working-class world of the Midwest, the isolations of small-town life, and the possibilities and occasions of beauty and grace among the machine shops and oil fields of rural Kansas.

Editorial Reviews

Review

". . . James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus spoke of forging the conscience of his race in the smithy of his soul; in the dusty light of a Kansas machine shop, B.H. Fairchild has performed similar magic. -- R.S. Gwynn

"B.H. Fairchild brings sympathetic insight to the people the machinists, welders, and farmers he writes of. And like a fine novelist, he has a gift for focusing on those moments when lives constrained by psychological or economic circumstances are touched by beauty and significance." -- Timothy Steele

"With elegance and restrained subtlety, Mr. Fairchild interweaves topics that become something like musical themes, including the central theme of machine work . . .Anyone who can lay claim to the authorship of this much excellent poetry wins my unqualified and grateful admiration." -- from the introduction by Anthony Hecht

After The Storm
Airlifting Horses
All The People In Hopper's Paintings
The Art Of The Lathe
The Ascension Of Ira Campbell
At The Excavation Of Liberal, Kansas
Beauty
The Book Of Hours
The Children
Cigarettes
The Death Of A Small Town
The Dumka
The Himalayas
In The House Of The Latin Professor
The Invisible Man
Kansas
Keats
Little Boy
The Machinist, Teaching His Daughter To Play The Piano
A Model Of Downtown Los Angeles, 1940
Old Men Playing Basketball
Old Women
Song
Speaking The Names
Thermoregulation In Winter Moths: 1. The Himalayas
Thermoregulation In Winter Moths: 2. Burn Ward
Two Photographs
The Welder, Visited By The Angel Of Mercy
Work: 1. Work
Work: 2. The Body
Work: 3. The Body And The Earth
Work: 4. The System Of Which The Body Is One Part
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

From the Back Cover

"Fairchild boldly plunders the territories of prose to expand the possibilities of contemporary verse. He undertakes to translate the various and splendid particularities of the novel, the memoir, and the travelogue and heighten them into the lyric mode. These fluent poems are omnivorously intelligent. The reader never knows what will come next; but, as deeply psychological in their probings as a novel, they always cohere." (Dana Gioia)

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Alice James Books (July 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1882295161
• ISBN-13: 978-1882295166
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #255,919 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

B.H. Fairchild was born in Houston, Texas and grew up there and in small towns in west Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. He attended the University of Kansas and University of Tulsa and now lives with his wife in Claremont, California. His awards include
the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bobbitt Award from the Library of Congress, and the California Book Awards Gold Medal (for Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest), and the Kingsley Tufts Award, William Carlos Williams Award, and Pen Center West Award for
The Art of the Lathe, which was also a finalist for the National Book Award. He has also received the Arthur Rense Prize from the Academy of Arts and Letters and the Modern Poetry Award from Sewanee Review for the body of his work, as well as Guggenheim and Rockefeller/Bellagio
Fellowships and two NEA Fellowships. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, Hudson Review, Sewanee Review and many other journals and anthologies.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Prize work, August 4, 2001

By 

David Graham "The author" (Wisconsin USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Art of the Lathe (Paperback)

Once in a while the prizes go to a book that truly deserves it. This is a wonderful collection. Fairchild's poems are mature, nuanced, strongly crafted, and moving. He's particularly good at mixing narrative with lyric, as in the stunning poem "Beauty." And see if you don't think that "Body and Soul" isn't the best baseball poem ever.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Art of the Articulate Heart, March 8, 2001

By 

Juan Mobili (Valley Cottage, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Art of the Lathe (Paperback)

B.H. Fairchild is one of the important American poets. Important for what he has to say and, even more, for the carefully crafted language in which he says it. The is an exceptional book of poetry, and, in my opinion, a manual on articulating, giving voice to, one's heart. I'm tempted here to quote from the poems, doubtlessly the best way to convey the depth and weight of his work but it's hard not to quote, practically, every poem. In a time of "no time," when efficiency has been elevated to a cult and success is measured by how much one can get others to do more work on one's behalf, Fairchild celebrates those who work, day after day, in the anonymity of hard, manual work. This book is for those readers who need to find beauty even in the dread of repetition and obscured futures. This book celebrates the men and women who no one celebrates, a treatise in "soul'making" written in unsentimental, yet passionate, words. How sadly woundrous that people, poets, artists of the depth and scope of B.H. Fairchild remain gold to be mined in the obscure depth of majestic mountains. Yet, just reading his masterful "Body and Soul" should be enough to procure a miner's hat and begin to mine the rock. Like Robert Hass, but in his own way, Fairchild elevates narrative, stories, to the height of pure poetry. It might recall for you, also, the receptive and heart-breaking beauty of James Wright poems, as another reviewer so wisely pointed out. In the poem "Body and Soul," I must mention it again, Fairchild speaks of men who might have witnessed the difference "between talent and genius." I believe I, too, have such experience with these poems.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fresh, Imaginative Work Poetry, April 14, 2004

By 

choiceweb0pen0 (Lafayette, LA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Art of the Lathe (Paperback)

Fairchild finds and creates beauty in surprising places: factories, backyards, and small towns, as well as people and objects. Many of his poems are able depict events without becoming overly sentimental, as in "The Machinist, Teaching His Daughter to Play the Piano," with a comparison between the playing the piano and operating machinery, " the gestures of voice and hands/ suspended over the keyboard/ that moves like the lathe in its turning." Experience, particularly work experience, is an important part of the poems in this collection. Some of the other poems in this book that I enjoy include "The Himalayas," and "Airlifting Horses."