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Title: Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest: Poems by B. H. Fairchild ISBN: 0-393-05096-3 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: November, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Memory as History
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Remarkable Collection
Comment: Fairchild has done it again with this new collection. EARLY OCCULT MEMORY SYSTEMS OF THE LOWER MIDWEST depicts the fading American midwest and the characters who inhabit it with grace and meditative intensity. Like its predecessor, THE ART OF THE LATHE, Fairchild's new book seamlessly weaves narrative with lyric epiphany. Poems such as "Moses Yellow Horse Is Throwing Water Balloons from the Hotel Roosevelt," "Rave On," and "The Blue Buick" entertain with their eccentric characters and sweeping narratives; while poems like "Delivering Eggs to the Girls' Dorm," "Luck," and "Brazil" are just plain entertaining. The variety of highs and lows in this book is reason enough to read it. Fairchild simply surprises the reader in every poem.
EARLY OCCULT MEMORY SYSTEMS OF THE LOWER MIDWEST offers a decidedly more complex perspective of the machine shop and the Kansas surrounding it. Poems such as "The Memory of a Possible Future," "The Memory Palace," and the title poem all suggest a conceptually bold collection searching for a "system" of memory, a way of crafting memory into art. From vantage points as far away from the midwest as Paris and the Villa Carlotta on Lake Como, Fairchild has gathered his pasts, both lived and unlived, "a tableau vivant / that all the while recedes-though held briefly / as we allow a rare Bordeaux to pool upon our tongues."
Fairchild has the uncanny ability to catch familiar characters, or those that ought to be familiar, while their brief moments of glory and fame, despair and madness, play out. Moses Yellow Horse, unable to endure his haunted past of having played one-and-a-half brief seasons in the major leagues, throws water balloons from the Hotel Roosevelt in final parodic rebellion. Mrs. Hill pounds maniacally on the door with "the cracked / porcelain of her hands" as her husband threatens her life with a shotgun. Travis Doyle and his buddies roll their car, just for kicks. A welder, on the side of the road, is visited by the angel of mercy. Characters appear incapable of distinguishing between past and present, fact and fiction, while Fairchild himself willingly amalgamates them. In "The Death of a Psychic," for instance-a subject most befitting the collection's difficult attempt at a backward gaze into the future-the psychic is "haunted by the knowledge of a certain year" when his own death visits him as he lies down "beneath, at last, the wide wings of the present tense." And if the characters to whom his previous books gave voice still appear to be quite vibrant and capable of surprise, that is because Fairchild himself is still capable of experiment and exploration.
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Title: The Art of the Lathe: Poems by B. H. Fairchild, Anthony Hecht ISBN: 1882295161 Publisher: Alice James Books Pub. Date: April, 1998 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: The Arrival of the Future by B. H. Fairchild ISBN: 1882295250 Publisher: Alice James Books Pub. Date: July, 2000 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: What Narcissism Means to Me : Poems by Tony Hoagland ISBN: 1555973868 Publisher: Graywolf Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Blue Hour : Poems by Carolyn Forche ISBN: 0060099127 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 04 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: In the Next Galaxy by Ruth Stone ISBN: 1556591780 Publisher: Copper Canyon Press Pub. Date: May, 2002 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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