Customer Reviews

The Art of the Lathe

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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.

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.

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."

Not since James Wright has there been a poet so skilled at representing the minds and imaginations of ordinary American working people. Fairchild's embellishment on that oeuvre is his ability to render the movements and conditions of the labor itself into gorgeous and durable verse; the transformation of work into art has rarely been one of the subjects of our poetry, but here it is. No one who reads The Art of the Lathe can easily forget the people Fairchild chronicles for us or the work they do, for these figures are not merely objects of abstract sympathy or actors in a politics or numbers in an economy. Who would want to forget the amazing Ira Campbell, star of his own poem, for whom philosophy consists of dead ideas until they are tested on the proving ground of an oil-drilling operation?

My husband, who hates poetry, loved these poems, which have, along with beauty, grace, and concision, the fascination and depth of good short stories. They treat the lives and deepest feelings of ordinary people with sympathy, honesty and a total lack of sentimentality. Sentimental poetry--in which the poet is sentimental about his own sensitivity, the troubles of his time, the evils of the pwerful or even his own evils--is very common and can lead to eloquent lines or, I might say, eloquent lies. A poet who weighs experiences and feelings with care, yet without diminishing their intensity, is less common. I come away from this book admiring the passion and balance of the author as much as I admire his skill as a poet.

This is possibly the way forward for poetry, Language and Performance having beaten themselves into an apolitical submission, Fairchild reminds us of the power of honest expression and the value of language for communicating about simple things. There's something almost Wittgensteinian in his embrace of the ordinary and his rejection of the metaphysics of so much of late 20th Century poetics. A truly important work.

Fairchild has written a book that is elegantly blue-collar. It is a poetic memoir of the highest caliber. In these down-to-earth poems, readers are shown that fathers and sons share a heart even when they do not share a collar. BH Fairchild will never spend his life turning a lathe. It is his task to turn out poems like these in order to honor the life of his father and all of our blue-collar fathers who work(ed) hard to make our own intellectual lives and pursuits possible.

This work is a collection of finely-crafted poems that celebrate the American way of life.

fairchild comes from a different and yet familiar place - his poems are so fascinating. they are incredibly masculine, without being boring or crass. fairchild has a unique voice that is deeply narrative and cunningly illustrative.

This book was a National Book Award Finalist, and deservedly (This Time by Gerald Stern won that year, but I haven't read it yet, so I can't compare).

Fairchild was born in Houston, and grew up in West Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. His upbringing very much shows in his work. This is the poetry of the blue-collar working class. This is very much the poetry of the west and of Texas. Fairchild writes mostly longer narratives and dramatic monologues (most with longish lines). Some of the best poems of his are: "Beauty" the 10 page narrative of the working man, and this poem is phenomenal. It is one of the best contemporary poems written. And in fact, the only modern day narrative that is better is Dave Mason's "In the Country I Remember", though not by much. There is also one of the best baseball poems in recent years (or maybe the best baseball poem ever), "Body and Soul", a great narrative that runs a few pages and touches on the truth of the human soul of the working man. Also of great note is "Keats" (it'll surprise you) and "Cigarettes" a poem that finally gives us a reason to smoke. Or at least an understanding. The other poems in this collection are also great, those four are just the best.

There are two signs that clued me in that this was going to be a great book (other than the finalist of the Nat'l Book Award). The first were the blurbs. R.S. Gwynn, the modern day Pope, says "[Fairchild] measures a world inhabited by those for whom life has made its meaning plain by constant subtraction...both real and mataphorical, that figure so prominently in this collection." Dana Gioia says of this collection: "Fairchild boldly plundesr the territories of prose to expand the possibilities of contemporary verse...These fluent poems are amnivorously intelligent. The reader never knows what will come next; but, as deeply psychological in their probings as a novel, they alwasy cohere." Tim Steele, one of the greatest of the modern metricists, says "Fairchild brings sympathetic insight to the people...he has a gift for focusing on those moments when lives constrained by psychological or economic circumstances are touched by beauty and significance." And Wyatt Prunty calls the poems "remarkably textured, genrous, haunting" .

And the other sign of this books importance is Anthony Hecth's introduction. No more needs to be said.

This was one of the first books of poetry I picked up, after seeing Fairchild read at my college. I was blown away by his reading and blown away by this book. Visiting it again after ten years, I am amazed at how great the poems still feel. I knew when I first read it that this was a fantastic book, and that still remains true today.
There are ways that Fairchild expresses emotion and vulnerability that seem hesitant, which is common, but then deliver honesty, love, and power. Even teaching this to a class of intro to poetry students had each of them relate how, even though they claimed not to like the book, at least one of the poems moved them immensely.