The Blue Buick
Page 21
—Kate Daniels, Southern Review
“The energetic and vivid poems of Usher are a delight . . . even those who approach poetry with trepidation will be mesmerized.”
—Deb Jurmu, Sacramento Book Review
“Usher should solidify B. H. Fairchild’s reputation as an essential force in contemporary letters. The praise he receives typically includes ‘American,’ suggesting a smaller audience than he deserves. He merits acclaim beyond the academy, beyond our shores.”
—Barbara Berman, The Rumpus
“The more one studies Fairchild’s poems, the more his intelligence surfaces along with his more obvious compassion. I have no trouble ranking him with the best poets of his generation.”
—David Mason, Hudson Review
“Fairchild’s singular distinction is his ability to make people and incidents in his work more actual than any, it seems, in any other kind of writing.”
—Booklist
“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.”
—Anthony Hecht
“ ‘The ache of thwarted desire’ and its mysterious and uncanny attachment to the people and landscape of southwest Kansas has been one of the abiding preoccupations of B. H. Fairchild’s poetry, and the trajectory it has traced over the past thirty years has inscribed one of the most colorful, exact, and memorable idioms into American poetry. What Sherwood Anderson, E. A. Robinson, and James Wright mined from their locales, Fairchild has perfected from his Oklahoma Panhandle, and that is to show that no matter how isolated in time and space, no matter how cut off from its dreams, the human spirit persists in believing that it is ‘on the edge of something, something rare.’ The Blue Buick is a magnificent and important addition to the grain of American poetry.”
—Michael Collier, author of An Individual History
“This book gathers essential poems from B. H. Fairchild’s epic exploration of contemporary American masculinity. He depicts the vexations of class and labor with the ‘tonnage of a full body / slam’ and ‘a kind of wonder / bodied forth.’ Virtuosic narratives, portraits and quiet lyrics offer ‘the heart’s dream / of art’s divinity,’ as they illuminate myths and heroes, gritty realities and triumphal moments of insight. I cherish these poems for their supple elegance and felt wisdom.”
—Robin Becker, author of Tiger Heron
“In the middle of the twentieth century, the poet James Wright asked, ‘Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness / Of the Midwest?’ Throughout his career, the indispensable poet B. H. Fairchild has answered, with that other great Midwesterner T. S. Eliot, ‘The sea is all about us.’ That is the sea of estrangement—from roots, from class, from childhood and family. Fairchild’s is an old story, but one that Americans have often had trouble telling, unlike their European counterparts. He tells it realistically, musically, and occasionally with that nostalgia which marks him as American. His unique power is in leading his dead from the field of personal memory and into the living history of the poem. We have had poets like this—Randall Jarrell, James Wright, Richard Hugo—inheritors of the legacy of Robert Frost. At this time, B. H. Fairchild stands almost alone in this tradition. We are lucky to have him.”
—Mark Jarman, author of Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems
ALSO BY B. H. FAIRCHILD
Usher
Trilogy
Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest
The Art of the Lathe
Local Knowledge
The Arrival of the Future
Such Holy Song: Music as Idea, Form, and Image in the Poetry of William Blake
Praise for The Blue Buick
“Fairchild achieved the kind of poetic everyday speech that has been an aspiration of modernism ever since the fruitful friendship of Robert Frost and Edward Thomas.”
—Chronicles
“Fairchild walks the boundary between vision and reality . . . crafting poems, narrative or lyric, that build toward ecstatic height or out-of-body experience, and with the inevitable crash and return to earth.”
—The Hudson Review
“His work embodies the topography and vernacular of the American Lower Midwest, but it also possesses a wisdom that transcends its geographic location; the poems consistently meditate on the potential of language itself.”
—American Literary Review
“By imagining, by envisioning in retrospect the beauty of the past, [Fairchild] creates present and future beauties as reflections and extensions of that past, though at the time it was merely the chrysalis of what would become, for him, beautiful.”
—Beloit Poetry Journal
“Fairchild’s poems work with meter, image, and diction to become both intellectually complicated and lyrically gorgeous.”
—Robert Stewart, New Letters
Praise for the Work of B. H. Fairchild
“Lush with cottonwoods, Kansas autumns, Ford tractors, dust devils, oil rigs, family and the pull of history, B. H. Fairchild’s poems resonate with loneliness, like the wide-open plains and small towns where he sets so many of them. . . . Fairchild speaks for anyone who has yearned to escape over the horizon [capturing] the unnamable longing that creeps into ordinary lives and slowly snuffs out youthful dreams. It is history, writ large and small, that beats strong through Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest. . . . This is the American voice at its best: confident and conflicted, celebratory and melancholic.”
—Michael Hainey, New York Times
“B. H. Fairchild is one of those poets prose readers love: Meaty, maximalist, driven by narrative, he stakes out an American mythos in which the personal and the collective blur. . . . [A] lack of sentimentality infuses Usher, an insistence on seeing things as they really are. That’s a vivid and compelling strategy, for at the heart of these poems is the issue of longing, of what we want and yet can never have.”
—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
“[The poems in Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest] are an ecstatic celebration of language—long, lavish lines sprawling across the page as the speaker’s consciousness roams the Kansas countryside. Fairchild is a spinner of tales who writes unforgettably of loneliness and the tenderness of the Midwest.”
—Elise Paschen, Chicago Tribune
“I daresay [Fairchild] has arrived with some of the future of American poetry in his hands. It satisfies this reader to know that someone so steady is running the machine.”
—Christopher Bakken, Contemporary Poetry Review
“Fairchild’s ability not only to choose a story but to pace it and to reveal its meaning through the unfolding of the narrative is probably unmatched in contemporary American poetry. The incisive psychology, the vividly descriptive diction, the large repertoire of vocabulary, the weightiness of his settings and plots: all these contribute to the delightful sensation that one is reading, simultaneously, the best poetry and best prose. I cannot think of another living poet capable of delivering such pleasure. . . . Not since James Wright has there been a poet so skilled at representing the minds and imaginations of ordinary American working people.”
—Kate Daniels, Southern Review
“The energetic and vivid poems of Usher are a delight . . . even those who approach poetry with trepidation will be mesmerized.”
—Deb Jurmu, Sacramento Book Review
“Usher should solidify B. H. Fairchild’s reputation as an essential force in contemporary letters. The praise he receives typically includes ‘American,’ suggesting a smaller audience than he deserves. He merits acclaim beyond the academy, beyond our shores.”
—Barbara Berman, The Rumpus
“The more one studies Fairchild’s poems, the mor
e his intelligence surfaces along with his more obvious compassion. I have no trouble ranking him with the best poets of his generation.”
—David Mason, Hudson Review
“Fairchild’s singular distinction is his ability to make people and incidents in his work more actual than any, it seems, in any other kind of writing.”
—Booklist
“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.”
—Anthony Hecht
“ ‘The ache of thwarted desire’ and its mysterious and uncanny attachment to the people and landscape of southwest Kansas has been one of the abiding preoccupations of B. H. Fairchild’s poetry, and the trajectory it has traced over the past thirty years has inscribed one of the most colorful, exact, and memorable idioms into American poetry. What Sherwood Anderson, E. A. Robinson, and James Wright mined from their locales, Fairchild has perfected from his Oklahoma Panhandle, and that is to show that no matter how isolated in time and space, no matter how cut off from its dreams, the human spirit persists in believing that it is ‘on the edge of something, something rare.’ The Blue Buick is a magnificent and important addition to the grain of American poetry.”
—Michael Collier, author of An Individual History
“This book gathers essential poems from B. H. Fairchild’s epic exploration of contemporary American masculinity. He depicts the vexations of class and labor with the ‘tonnage of a full body / slam’ and ‘a kind of wonder / bodied forth.’ Virtuosic narratives, portraits and quiet lyrics offer ‘the heart’s dream / of art’s divinity,’ as they illuminate myths and heroes, gritty realities and triumphal moments of insight. I cherish these poems for their supple elegance and felt wisdom.”
—Robin Becker, author of Tiger Heron
“In the middle of the twentieth century, the poet James Wright asked, ‘Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness / Of the Midwest?’ Throughout his career, the indispensable poet B. H. Fairchild has answered, with that other great Midwesterner T. S. Eliot, ‘The sea is all about us.’ That is the sea of estrangement—from roots, from class, from childhood and family. Fairchild’s is an old story, but one that Americans have often had trouble telling, unlike their European counterparts. He tells it realistically, musically, and occasionally with that nostalgia which marks him as American. His unique power is in leading his dead from the field of personal memory and into the living history of the poem. We have had poets like this—Randall Jarrell, James Wright, Richard Hugo—inheritors of the legacy of Robert Frost. At this time, B. H. Fairchild stands almost alone in this tradition. We are lucky to have him.”
—Mark Jarman, author of Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems
Copyright © 2014, 2009, 2005, 2003 by B. H. Fairchild. Copyright © 1991 by Quarterly Review of Literature.
B. H. Fairchild, “The Woman at the Laundromat Crying ‘Mercy,’ ” “The Men,” “The Robinson Hotel” (from Kansas Avenue), “Flight,” “Angels,” “Groceries,” “Night Shift,” “Hair,” “To My Friend,” “The Limits of My Language,” and “Late Game” from The Arrival of the Future. Copyright © 2002 by B. H. Fairchild. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Alice James Books, www.alicejamesbooks.org.
B. H. Fairchild, “Beauty,” “The Invisible Man,” “All the People in Hopper’s Paintings,” “The Book of Hours,” “Cigarettes,” “The Himalayas,” “Body and Soul,” “Airlifting Horses,” “Old Men Playing Basketball,” “Old Woman,” “Song,” “Thermoregulation in Winter Moths,” “Keats,” “The Ascension of Ira Campbell,” “The Dumka,” “A Model of Downtown Los Angeles, 1940,” “The Children,” “Little Boy,” “The Welder, Visited by the Angel of Mercy,” “The Death of a Small Town,” and “The Art of the Lathe” from The Art of the Lathe. Copyright © 1998 by B. H. Fairchild. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Alice James Books, www.alicejamesbooks.org.
Excerpts from “The Bridge,” from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane by Hart Crane, edited by Marc Simon. Copyright 1933, 1958, 1966 by Liveright Publishing Corporation. Copyright © 1986 by Marc Simon. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
All rights reserved.
First published as a Norton paperback 2016
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Book design by Chris Welch
Production manager: Anna Oler
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Fairchild, B. H.
[Poems. Selections]
The blue buick : new and selected poems / B. H. Fairchild. — First edition.
pages ; cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-393-24026-9 (hardcover)
I. Title.
PS3556.A3625A6 2014
811'.54—dc23
2014017290
ISBN 978-0-393-24398-7 (e-book)
ISBN 978-0-393-35216-0 (pbk.)
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