Customer Reviews

Usher: Poems

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USHER
B.H. Fairchild
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
ISBN: 978-0-393-06575-6
$24.95 - Hardback
122 pages
Reviewer: Annie Slessman

As I started my read of USHER by B.H. Fairchild I had no expectations. I had not read his previous works nor did I know his reputation as a poet. After reading The Gray Man and Frieda Pushnik - I was hooked.

B.H. Fairchild uses prose like David used the slingshot - he takes simple language and packs a real punch. As I read The Deer, I had to remind myself to breathe. The images he provokes are breathtaking and linger in the mind long after finishing the work.

In the poem entitled Cendrars, Fairchild describes phantom pain in a missing limb, "it is like memory, the memory that will not quite go away, that it is in effect the body's memory, but more, that it is like poetry, the phantom life: not there in any material way, yet intensely there to the reader, the amputee who has lost some nameless yet essential limb of existence, probably on the long, dark path out of childhood. Teary-eyed with excitement, the reader can say of the poem, yes, this is life, or better, this is life within life, but try to convince the passerby, the onlooker, who will simply observe the empty sleeve flapping in the wind and shake his head sadly."

If you are a lover of poetry, you will want to add this work to your library. If you do not as yet appreciate the art of poetry, this would be the book of poetry that would mold your love of poetry.

I'm tempted to call B.H. Fairchild the "thinking man's Ted Kooser," but that would both belittle Kooser's own subtle intelligence and miss the impressive originality of Fairchild's accomplishment in Usher. Like Kooser, Fairchild is a poet whose aesthetic is conspicuously American, even Midwestern (lower Midwest, in Fairchild's case). Yet Fairchild is far more inclined toward narrative and dramatic monologue than is Kooser and is far more bookish in his philosophy. The result in Usher is the experience of reading a phantom story, laced with philosophical treatise: a book that fits together as a narrative, but one too subtle and finely evocative to be pinned down to plot summary or argumentative outline. In this, Fairchild resembles his obvious forefather, Hart Crane. In many ways, the book's tone and subject matter are established in the first poem, "The Gray Man," whose elusive title character is the first in a series of outsiders that will include circus freaks, a seminary student, a weeping piano man, nuns, and Hart Crane himself. In fact, one may say that Fairchild's subject matter in this book is the American "other," which, wonderfully, comes to include the poet himself who, contrary to current fashion, remains as elusive as the book's other primary characters. This is a smart, touching, and constantly engaging book, well worth repeated reading.

SUPERB TO THE MAX! No wonder Dr. Fairchild has won nearly every poetry award the literati has to offer. What's next--the Pulitzer? This is poetry at its finest--imagery, emotion, transportation--WOW!
LC