B. H. Fairchild – författare

Although many of the poems here unfold among the small towns, abandoned farms, and slate skies of the rural Midwest, their larger landscape is the sheer fact; geographical, psychological, metaphysical; of "absences like so many lighted windows as you walk through a strange city, wanting to fill them with imaginary lives and words and stories."

B. H. Fairchild's memory systems are the collective vision of America's despairing dreamers—failed baseball players, oil field laborers, a surrealist priest, college boys at a burlesque theater, the last remaining cast members of The Wizard of Oz. Looming over all is the fact and the mystery of our continued renewal.

From Manhattan to the rural Midwest—one of our most distinguished poets offers a verbal cinema of America. Employing dramatic monologues, among other forms, Usher embraces a range of subject matter and modes, from the elegiac to the comic. At its heart, however, is the long poem “Trilogy,” consisting of three interrelated dramatic monologues spoken by a circus performer, a theological student and part-time usher, and Hart Crane. A Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of 2009.

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" (The New York Times).Fairchild's poetry covers a wide range, both geographically and intellectually, though it finds its centre in the rural Midwest: in oilfields and dying small towns, in taverns, baseball fields, one-screen movie theatres 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."

In this stirring volume, award-winning poet B. H. Fairchild seeks the ironic, haunting presence imbuing each ordinary life with beauty, power and meaning. By turns polyphonic and deeply personal, these poems range from Kansas highways and sunbaked baseball fields to secondhand memories of a Second World War foxhole. They zoom in on a welder’s truck, a superstore on Black Friday and a record store, where a chance encounter offers radiant kindness in the face of grief. In a suite of prose poems written in the returning persona of the machinist and philosopher Roy Eldridge Garcia, “a watcher of things”, Fairchild finds sacred meaning in domestic scenes and expansive imagined narratives. Throughout, the poet evokes the brutal beauty of the American heartland, a morning’s “sheet-metal sky” and a grandfather’s farm, with its “dusty creek, damp / only when the winter wheat was bogged / in snow.”Elevating blue-collar work and scenes from small towns in clear-eyed, reverent poetry, Fairchild proves himself once again “the American voice at its best: confident and conflicted, celebratory and melancholic” (The New York Times).