Seven Poets

DESPITE MUCH FULSOME PRAISE, critics have made two mistakes in reviewing the poetry of B. H. Fairchild. On the one hand, they've read him as a stylized proletarian; on the other, they've pegged him as the middle-aged professor sentimentalizing his early days of manual labor. Such readings miss the range and accomplishment of his best poems as well as the intellectual penetration of his vision. They resemble simplifications of other so-called regional poets, as if it were assumed that intellectual lives could not or should not exist outside certain previously sanctioned cultural centers and social classes. 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.

Though his first two collections contained good poems, it was with his third, The Art of the Lathe (1998), that he really hit his stride. Anchored by two genuine masterpieces, "Beauty" and "Body and Soul," the book swept up a number of national awards and continues to win new readers. Fairchild was in his fifties when he published it, but more precocious and coddled talents have failed to produce anything of such power. Better late than never, I say.

The success of that book led to a contract with Norton for his new collection, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, which has justly won the National Book Critics Circle Award and comes bedecked with blurbs from a pantheon of poets. Don't let the hype put you off. Fairchild is still writing beautifully, and his new book offers additional keys to his oeuvre that we should not ignore.1

Begin with that lengthy title, taken from the book's opening poem about a boy riding in the family car and a dawning consciousness of word and world. Fairchild has read his Heidegger, and the poem presses against notions of presence and absence in relation to language.

In his fifth year the son, deep in the backseat

of his father's Ford and the mysterium

of time, holds time in memory with words,

night, this night, on the way to a stalled rig south

of Kiowa Creek where the plains wind stacks the skeletons of weeds on barbed-wire fences and rattles the battered DeKalb sign to make the child think of time in its passing, of death.

Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe up the gullied, mud-hollowed road. Road, this road. Roustabouts shouting from the crow's nest float like Ascension angels on a ring of lights. Chokecherries gouge the purple sky, cloud-swags running the moon under, and starlight rains across the Ford's blue hood. Blue, this blue.

Later, where black flies haunt the mud tank, the boy walks along the pipe rack dragging a stick across the hollow ends to make a kind of music, and the creek throbs with frog songs, locusts, the rasp of tree limbs blown and scattered. The great horse people, his father, these sounds, these shapes saved from time's dark creek as the car moves across the moving earth: world, this world.

Just because Fairchild locates ideas in the local does not mean they are any less ideas. On the book's jacket flaps the publishers have reproduced an illustration from Ars Brevis, a work of thirteenth-century mystical system-making by Ramon Llull, now credited with a sort of analogical thinking that prefigures computer language. The point, I assume, is that Llull made connections among apparently disparate symbolisms, and Fairchild's books are likewise organized sets of associations. The Art of the Lathe is a title that, without offering any conclusions, suggests a secret order of forms that human beings intuit but cannot command. Now these "occult" memory systems-poems-arrive for related purposes. Fairchild's poems are deeply humane, of course, but their intellectual subtexts blend skeptical linguistics with mystical designs. It's not for nothing that this author published a dissertation on another poet of private systems, William Blake.

Fairchild is also a student of French culture, and as an epigraph to "The Blue Buick: A Narrative," he quotes his own translation of a Biaise Cendrars passage concerning a literary initiation:

And I recited to myself that immortal, and for me unforgettable, page by Marbode on the symbolism of precious stones which I had just discovered in Le Latin mystique by Rémy de Gourmont, a gem of a book, a compilation, a translation, an anthology, which turned me upside-down and, in short, baptized me, or at the very least, converted me to Poetry, initiated me into the Word, catechized me.

What follows is a working-class story, but also the tale of an unknown writer, Roy Garcia, who contributes three poems to Fairchild's collection. The book is, then, sympathetic in its post-modern structure, selfreflexive but full of feeling. It is more full-bodied in its thinking, more thoughtful in its emotions, than most contemporary poetry.

Fairchild frames the book with a lyrical passage from James Agee's A Death in the Family-the same passage is layered into the final prose poem, "The Memory Palace," in another literary catechism. I only began to sense the power of Fairchild's writing here when I read the poem aloud with a group of students. As in his verse narratives, the structure of the piece is aided by a strong command of sentence rhythms, a bigvoiced rhetoric.