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Overview
“[B. H. Fairchild] is the American voice at its best: confident and conflicted, celebratory and melancholic.”—New York Times
Gathering works from five of B. H. Fairchild's previous volumes stretching over thirty years, and adding twenty-six brilliant new poems, The Blue Buick showcases the career of a poet who represents "the American voice at its best: confident and conflicted, celebratory and melancholic" (New York Times).Fairchild's poetry covers a wide range, both geographically and intellectually, though it finds its center in the rural Midwest: in oilfields and dying small towns, in taverns, baseball fields, one-screen movie theaters, and skies "vast, mysterious, and bored." Ultimately, its cultural scope—where Mozart stands beside Patsy Cline, with Grunewald, Gödel, and Rothko only a subway ride from the Hollywood films of the 1950s—transcends region and decade to explore the relationship of memory to the imagination and the mysteries of time and being. And finally there is the character of Roy Eldridge Garcia, a machinist/poet/philosopher who sees in the landscape and silence of the high plains the held breath of the earth, "as if we haven't quite begun to exist. That coming into being still going on."
From the machine work elevated to high art that is the subject of The Arrival of the Future (1985) to the despairing dreamers of Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (2002) to the panoramic, voice-driven structure of Usher (2009), Fairchild's work, "meaty, maximalist, driven by narrative, stakes out an American mythos" (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times).
From "The Blue Buick:"
A boy standing on a rig deck looks across the plains.
A woman walks from a trailer to watch the setting sun.
A man stands beside a lathe, lighting a cigar.
Imagined or remembered, a girl in Normandy
Sings across a sea, that something may remain.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780393243987 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 319 KB |
About the Author
Table of Contents
From The Arrival of the Future (1985)
The Woman at the Laundromat Crying "Mercy" 1
The Men 2
The Robinson Hotel (from Kansas Avenue) 4
Flight 6
Angels 8
Groceries 9
Night Shift 10
Hair 12
To My Friend 14
The Limits of My Language: English 85B 15
Late Game 18
From Local Knowledge (1991)
In Czechoslovakia 21
In a Café near Tuba City, Arizona, Beating My Head against a Cigarette Machine 24
Language, Nonsense, Desire 26
There Is Constant Movement in My Head 28
Maize 30
In Another Life I Encounter My Father 31
The Machinist, Teaching His Daughter to Play the Piano 33
The Doppler Effect 35
Toban's Precision Machine Shop 36
Speaking the Names 38
Local Knowledge 40
Kansas 49
The Soliloquy of the Appliance Repairman 50
Work 52
L'Attente 56
From The Art of the Lathe (1998)
Beauty 61
The Invisible Man 70
All the People in Hopper's Paintings 72
The Book of Hours 76
Cigarettes 78
The Himalayas 80
Body and Soul 82
Airlifting Horses 87
Old Men Playing Basketball 89
Old Women 91
Song 93
Thermoregulation in Winter Moths 95
Keats 98
The Ascension of Ira Campbell 100
The Dumka 101
A Model of Downtown Los Angeles, 1940 103
The Children 107
Little Boy 109
The Welder, Visited by the Angel of Mercy 111
The Death of a Small Town 113
The Art of the Lathe 114
From Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (2003)
Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest 119
Moses Yellowhorse Is Throwing Water Balloons from the Hotel Roosevelt 120
Mrs. Hill 123
The Potato Eaters 126
Hearing Parker the First Time 128
Delivering Eggs to the Girls' Dorm 129
Rave On 131
A Photograph of the Titanic 136
Blood Rain 138
The Death of a Psychic 140
Luck 141
A Roman Grave 143
On the Passing of Jesus Freaks from the College Classroom 144
Brazil 145
Weather Report 147
The Second Annual Wizard of Oz Reunion in Liberal, Kansas 148
The Blue Buick 150
Mile Pym (from Three Poems by Roy Eldridge Garcia) 181
The Deposition 182
A Starlit Night 184
Motion Sickness 186
A Wall Map of Paris 188
At the Café de Flore 190
At Omaha Beach 191
The Memory Palace 192
From Usher (2009)
The Gray Man 203
Trilogy 205
Frieda Pushnik 206
Usher 210
Hart Crane in Havana 217
Key to "Hart Crane in Havana" 221
The Cottonwood Lounge 225
Les Passages 227
Wittgenstein, Dying 229
The Barber 231
Hume 234
Gödel 237
From The Beauty of Abandoned Towns
1 The Beauty of Abandoned Towns 241
2 Bloom School 246
3 The Teller 248
4 Wheat 250
Madonna and Child, Perryton, Texas, 1967 252
What He Said 254
From Five Prose Poems from the Journals of Roy Eldridge Garcia Cendrars 259
Piano 260
Moth 262
Triptych: Nathan Gold, Maria, On the Waterfront
Nathan Gold 265
Maria 267
On the Waterfront 270
New Poems
The Story 275
Red Snow 277
The Left Fielder's Sestina 278
Betty 280
The Game 282
The Student Assistant 283
History: Four Poems
1 Dust Storm, No Man's Land, 1952 287
2 Shakespeare in the Park, 9/11/2011 289
3 Economics 290
4 Alzheimer's 292
Three Girls Tossing Rings 294
The Death of a Gerbil 295
Pale from the Hand of the Child That Holds It 296
Three Prose Poems from the Journals of Roy Eldridge Garcia An Attaché Case 299
The End of Art 300
The Language of the Future 301
Language 302
Abandoned Grain Elevator 306
The Men on Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, 1975 308
Getting Fired 310
On the Death of Small Towns: A Found Poem 311
Leaving 313
Swan Lake 315
Obed Theodore Swearingen, 1883-1967 316
Rothko 317
A House 318
Poem (from Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest) Poem 323
Notes 325
Acknowledgments 331