B.H. Fairchild's *Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest* had to be a daunting task not because of its one hundred twenty plus pages but because it follows Fairchild's *Art of the Lathe* (Alice James Books 1998), winner of around a dozen national awards.
The difference between the new book and the last is, primarily, two-fold: a long narrative poem forms the centerpiece of the book rather than introducing the book and a tighter formal reign keeps these poems more measured/steady, so they sound more like poems. In fact, Fairchild's formal talents ("Weather Report" and "Delivering Eggs to the Girls' Dorms") whose excellence draw him closer to major poets like Anthony Hecht and Richard Wilbur and away from minor poets Philip Levine and Donald Justice. (Justice can write a formal poem, but he has always gotten too much credit for it.) And, as with Levine and Justice, the working man and nostalgia are the subject matter for many of the poems, but Fairchild's workers are more stoic and more complex than Levine's. What's more, Fairchild's nostalgia for the past not only honors the past (see Justice) but informs the present and even movement into the future. See "History," The Death of a Psychic" and "The Memory of a Possible Future." Fairchild's memories ask questions about themselves, never afraid to doubt out loud.
The best poems in the collection are the shorter lyrics. There are fine poems that will go over well at readings ("Brazil" "Rave On" and "Luck"-who wouldn't want to hear these read aloud?), but these are not the poems that mesmerize the close reader into closer and closer readings alone in a room. You want to read a poem like "Brazil" aloud to all your friends. But "Delivering Eggs to the Girls' Dorm"-this needs to be seen in print in all its formal intricacy. This poem is so palpable and sweet with language, you could eat it. The diction of the poem emasculates the speaker while intensifying the sexuality around him. He is the one with the eggs, remember, while the girls are "eggless." And the words throughout taunt the speaker: "pregnant," "underwear," "moon," "kissed," "snakes," "cherry," and "bare" almost innocently appear in this fairly short poem. The sexual tension is maddening, in the best way possible. If I had space in this review, I could write a short treatise on effective line breaks here ("The flour / in her beard" or "Outside / stood" or "emptiness / became") and on other subtleties like the many internal rhymes and the anagramatic "bells" reduced to "the broken shell" in that wonderful last line.
If the book is "about" anything, it's about memory. The bookend poems are memory poems: "Memory" in the titles and Memory (with a capital M) at the heart of the meditations. But Fairchild's is not the kind of memory that most of our budding contemporary poets use as a tool. Not just personal memory, however valuable, however genuine and poignant. A reader gets a sense here, because of the quality of setting and scope through language, that memories, however acutely personal, should have the power of history.
Shakespeare, in *The Sonnets,* understood that Time is a bother, a nuisance, and a frustrating hope. In Fairchild's title poem, he, as a boy, discovers a way to control at least one aspect of time, namely memory. This poem, however limited in its effect, gives us some instruction on where the book will take us. The boy "holds time in memory with words" through simple vocal repetitions, e.g. "night, this night" or "Blue, this blue." There is, as in Shakespeare, a powerful play between words, repetition, and time. That's why, in this book, it's so fitting that Fairchild is moving more and more toward traditional formal structures (whose repetitions are more in number and complexity-rhyme, meter, lines, stanzas, etc.)
Alice James Books must hate (and love) to watch Norton publish this one. They can comfort themselves in the fact that poetry buyers, however few there may be, will be going back to the shelves to find out how Fairchild's genius emerged so vividly in Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest. Good for these readers that *The Art of the Lathe* (Alice James Books, 1998) and *The Arrival of the Future* (Swallow's Tale Press, 1986-reprint by Alice James Books, 2000) remain in print.
