Dismantling the Hills

by Michael McGriff

Dismantling the Hills is a testament to working-class, rural American life. In a world of machinists, loggers, mill workers, and hairdressers, the poems collected here bear witness to a landscape, an industry, and a people teetering on the edge of ruin. From tightly constructed narratives to expansive and surreal meditations, the various styles in this book not only reflect the poet's range, but his willingness to delve into his obsessions from countless angles Full of despair yet never self-loathing, full of praise yet never nostalgic, Dismantling the Hills is both ode and elegy. McGriff's vision of blue-collar life is one of complication and contradiction, and the poems he makes are authentic, unwavering, and unapologetically American.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 2008

About the author

A native of Oregon, poet Michael McGriff is the author of collections Choke and Dismantling The Hills (which won the 2007 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize), and his work has appeared in the publications Slate, Field, The Believer, and Poetry. He has also translated a number of works by Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, including The Sorrow Gondola. Receiving his MFA in creative writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, he is currently a lecturer at Stanford University.

Reviews

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are poems from a world I don’t know, the Pacific Northwest of small towns and the lumber industry: paper mills and logging roads, slash piles, steam donkeys, choker setters, the narrator and his father bucking timber. It’s desolate beauty or sometimes just desolation, staying, stuck. “I could say I left town for both of us,” the narrator of “Iron” says, but then, later in the poem, admits, “But I never left” (p 1). I like “Ash and Silt,” the images of it: “the smell of orange peels and cinnamon,” shortening and pine pitch (p 6). My favorite poem in the book is “Coos Bay,” a string of images to make a town: “The World’s Largest Lumber Port,” a sign announces in the first line, then “Japanese glass floats, cranberry bogs/mooring lines, salmon roe,/swing shifts, green chain, millwrights” (p 11). A close second, though, is “Brief Elegy on the Tip of a Match,” the simple grace of it, the wonderful image of “the leaves going silver/like fish changing direction” (p 33). You can listen to the author read a slightly different version of "Brief Elegy on the Tip of a Match here, and hear him read a slightly different version of "Coos Bay" here.

[Dorianne Laux · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another fabulous young poet who writes with grit and grace about the lives of real people in a dreamscape of language.
Fluid yet rough-edged, tough and true. This is a poet who gives me faith in the next generation.

[Elizabeth]

Oh my. A disclaimer: I know Mike. But this book! Coos Bay through dream and chainsaw, through stars and pulp mill. This is a beautiful, controlled, passionate book. Work and longing, family and childhood. The hurt of a town and the beauty of its particulars.

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

stop what you are doing. get this book. read it. seriously. stop what you are doing and get this book. mcgriff is a wonderful new voice in american poetry. deeply engaging and moving poetry. go. now!

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really gorgeous book firmly grounded in place and working class concerns as well as the bible. McGriff's poems are heartbreaking in their ability to find beauty in unexpected--even unwanted--ways.

[Nicole Buckley · Rating 5 out of 5]

No one does it like McGriff.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've spent many late summer nights under poor light on the back porch with this collection for company. What wonderful, bright nights: accepting the invitation to study the "tempered phrases," the fury, and the "impeccable rhetoric" of Emerson's "Letter to President Van Buren"; wondering which lines from the collection might make good book titles; rereading "Coos Bay" and being as surprised and saddened by the final image as I was the first time I read it; unexpedctedly finding Melville's voice at the conclusion of "Keats's Sparrow"; admiring the originality and appropriateness of McGriff's metaphors (especially those for the morning); appreciating precision images resulting from hyper-observation and exquisite imagining; playing with the wonderful ambiguity of "Iron"'s last sentence; wanting but failing to understand every line of every poem; thinking I should make blackberry pies for my mother; hearing the overtones of Hemingway in "Shift Change, 9 A.M."; pleased that each rereading is valuable and fresh.

[Alli · Rating 5 out of 5]

McGriff does an excellent job of bringing the darkness (both internal and external) of the Pacific Northwest to us, without stamping out the unusual beauty and endurance of the place and the people who live there. His allusion and imagery wrap you up and swallow you whole, stamping out your own environment and inserting his. Reading these poems is fundamentally an experience of anger, wonder, and a stubborn, jealous hope.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Terrific stuff. From a family of a laid-off millworker in a declined milltown in Oregon, and insistently of that place but also filled with attempts to transcend that place--that both do and don't succeed. I'll be coming back to these poems.

[John Struloeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

An outstanding debut collection. Can't wait for his second book to come out!

[Ann Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you grew up or have ever lived in Oregon (or the Pacific Northwest in general), you must read this. Sharply real, without pretense, startling.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

McGriff's debut collection was one of the best books I read in 2008. Check out my review published at Anti http://anti-poetry.com/weyantkar1/

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I lived in Coos Bay for a year, probably before McGriff was born. It has multiple essences. Like Sometimes a Great Notion, he nails some of them. Beautiful work.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really great collection of poetry. Lots of emotion, gripping imagery; sort of a love letter to McGriff's hometown. Not my favorite style of poetry, but definitely worth a read.

[Serena · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slim volume full of poems about the Pacific Northwest. I particularly enjoyed Mr. McGriff's poems about people, his nature poems were harder to grasp.

A lovely little volume.

[Aletheia H · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his 2007 work Dismantling the Hills, Michael McGriff explores themes of futility, desperation, and hope.

Though frequently harsh and uncomfortable, McGriff’s sharp descriptions force us to notice the hard, mechanical features of the outside world. We must notice tension, both in the natural world (“mineral strangle / of roots, clay bleeding down”) and the world of manmade objects, such as the “winding bayfront chip yards” of “The World’s Largest Lumber Port” (“Silt” and “Coos Bay”).

Throughout the book, McGriff brings the reader to focus on the natural substances that undergird their daily experience. Wood-related images emerge frequently, consistently displaying the heavy prevalence of industry and the commonman’s struggle to stay alive. For many, wood is a central aspect of work and livelihood: it is the labor of father and son, father and daughter, and the many desperate laborers who—with the narrator’s father—must at one point “punch out of Georgia Pacific’s sawmill forever” (“Seasons Between Night and Day”).

As a whole, the collection emanates a feeling of futility and desperation. The theme appears blatantly in “Ash and Silt,” where the narrator speaks of “enter[ing] / this same God-dead town again and again until I vanish.” More subtly in “Brief Elegy on the Tip of a Match,” McGriff speaks of “trees / whose names I never bothered to learn.” The learning, it seems, would be insignificant: a feeble addition to the “ten dollars a day” of work.

Ostensibly, too, all of life is left to the movement of fate. “The Last Temptation of Christ” explores the possibility of the Lord Himself, broken only weeks after the crucifixion, “drunk and chain-smoking, weeping / in the arms of [His] secretary.”

Despite the dismal circumstances, the poems connect desperation to hope. Tonya represents this in part, her own dreams “soar[ing] above everything with the red-shouldered hawks.” She, at least, can see the beauty of “reincarnation” and unwavering belief. The children, likewise, imagine a world beyond their own. They dream of “approaching armies” and little, silent “kingdom[s]” in the slash piles (“Iron”). By the end of the book, the narrator seems to have apprehended some of the hopefulness of his childhood self. He believes, now, that “This is not a loathsome world: / each suffering lies stitched / to the wing of another.” “Death rises,” he says, “and death recedes, / the mouth of this life threaded / to the voice of the afterlife.”

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

From a bag of books kindly given to me by SB (Thanks, Sim). I started here continuing a thread of reading what gets framed as working-class lit (& who framed as wc writers)--and hope to move, quickly, for once, thru these books. In this book, the world that was in a stream of consonant images. It is the Pacific Northwest and the work of ripping into its green side in a kind of language that seems to make even things and people that were broken things and people that are whole. The poems are sweetly sad; they're easy and pleasant to read. I wish they asked more questions, wish they were less accepting of the damage of the interaction of wc ppl and ecologies in an extractive economy. In the school of Philip Levine, or, a kind of Philip Levine-itis.

[Nitivia]

Great sense of place!

[Gabby · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book makes me remember why I love my small town, and the people who built it.