An Ordinary Life: Poems

by B.H. Fairchild

A poet whose work is “a cause of celebration” (John Freeman, Boston Globe ) reveals the extraordinary within the ordinary. 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 World War II foxhole. They zoom in on a welder’s truck, a Walmart 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” ( New York Times ).

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Hardcover

Published January 24, 2023

About the author

B. H. Fairchild, the author of several acclaimed poetry collections, has been a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Claremont, California.

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good collection that provides an overview and look back over this poet's life. Fairchild's life as a poet, his marriage, a bit of baseball, and, tragically, the loss of son due to suicide. There's some serious grief operates in a number of these poems, particularly the spot on "On The Sorrow God Pours into the Little Boat of Life," which just knocked me out. If you've ever lost someone, suddenly (not just by suicide), this poem captures perfectly the disorientation and overwhelming grief of such a loss. That said, there is also a gentle thankfulness in a number of these poems for life well-lived, as in Ecclesiastes 3:1.

[Paul Macomber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fairchild’s possible last book of poetry ends on a heartbreaking note. His son, Paul, passed five years ago and his poems bounce between memory, regret and a deep appreciation for life itself. His alter ego Roy Garcia makes a return and the book ends in a dreamlike poem of the speaker playing baseball. If you love poetic stories, any of Fairchild’s works are for you.

[Leah CE · Rating 4 out of 5]

-“and once again I know as if by physical touch alone the innocence and kindness of the hopeful before the world disappoints them and it all seems like some awful rowing toward God in a hard rain, one wave, one lie, after another, and they are so tired, the oars so heavy, that they slowly open their hands and pray and lean into the dark”-

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being a first-generation middle-class poet isn’t easy. I sit at a desk and peck at a laptop all day. Not poems; emails to colleagues, research summaries, proposed company policies. The Florida sun bakes the streets outside and I think back to the rural Midwest, the place I was apparently born, but don’t remember. I struggle to reconcile my surroundings with those of my small-town, blue-collar forebears, measuring myself against them on the yardstick of life. 

Like all good, middle-class poets, my yardstick is a metaphor. Unlike them, my yardstick is also a yardstick. The words “United Auto Workers, Howard County, CAP Council” are pressed in solidarity and ink along its length between the 11th and 25th inch marks. The ruler’s an heirloom, once belonging to my grandmother, maybe my aunt or uncle, or possibly a cousin. All of them worked in Kokomo, Indiana factories. When I feel conflicted about being a degreed and urbane capitalist cog, I slide the yardstick out of the closet and look at it, and feel a little bit closer to believing that, yeah, I’m still kinda workin’ class.

B. H. Fairchild’s latest book, An Ordinary Life (W.W. Norton, 2023), expounds upon a metaphor from his seminal collection, The Art of the Lathe (Alice James Books, 1998). A lathe is a machine that creates symmetrical objects by rotating wood or metal around an axis. The material is trimmed and formed by the machinist operating the lathe as it spins. “Lathework,” the poet once said, “holds the model for everything I have written, especially poems.” The craft of poetry–the requisite attention to detail, to “small matters” performed on the page–is like lathework. The lathe is Fairchild’s yardstick, a symbol of his father’s livelihood, against which he measures his own life and work as a poet.

When Fairchild ponders “The Hat” left on a bench, its “circularity without purpose”, that is until it rains and becomes a vessel, a container, he’s abstractly weighing the importance of poetry with more practical things. His hat is now magically “utilitarian and yet transcendent”. He really wants poetry to be, like the hat, a thing that is both beautiful and useful to society, specifically to his blue collar “origins that we felt were in the past but are in fact always revealing themselves in the future become present.” This utility is personified in “Poem Beginning With a Rejected Line by W.H. Auden.” Caroline Henderson, a school teacher living on the Great Plains in pioneer times, “loved the land in ways today we cannot / understand.” Henderson reads revolutionary philosophy and poetry, while protecting her daughter, Eleanor, from Dust Bowl storms by draping a wet cloth over her crib. Henderson prays “in her angry, solitary way” that she’d grow up and move away to study medicine one day. And that Eleanor does, returning at the end of the poem to pronounce her mother’s cause of death. 

One aspect of An Ordinary Life I found intriguing, and in alignment with the focus on working class roots, is its dubiously presented and also weirdly specific allusions to left-wing politics coupled with subtle critiques of the consumerist/capitalist/imperialist tenor of ordinary American life past and present. Communist poets Paul Éluard and Meridel Le Sueur are named-dropped, as well as the Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam and the erstwhile People’s College in Fort Scott, Kansas. We hear about the irresponsible use of natural resources, the Spencerian survival-of-the-fittest mentality of American settler-colonialism, and its workaday descendant, the dog-eat-dog world. Fairchild’s alien caricature of the world of corporate leadership in “The Meeting of the Board” is the most subdued yet unflattering critique. Like Fairchild, the board members’ fathers “weigh heavily upon their backs”, but unlike Fairchild, who does his best to bring his father’s influence, good and bad, into the light, their “acquired grace of mercantile demeanor renders the daddies scarcely noticeable.” The atmosphere of the meeting is eerily calm, permeated by “the low rumbling of the voices of commerce” making decisions in their narrow self-interests. Their power seems ethereal, neither beautiful, nor practical.

 The collection begins with more physicality. In “Welder,” Fairchild uses his father’s voice to frame working-class distaste for “his poet’s life” with delicacy, while reenacting for us the genesis of lathework (or more generally, metalwork, like welding) as a model for writing poetry. Fairchild is able to imagine the space his father is making, giving his son a place in his world where “It’s not poetry. But it’s what I do.” Fairchild can believe that that world hasn’t rejected him in the same way he rejected it by going off to college to study poetry. He sees a chance yet to reclaim his blue collar roots, including the “box of tools kept oiled / and free from rust, my steel-toed boots and fine / bronze cutting torch, a welding unit good / as new, and a pickup truck with a bed / where he can sleep, dream, ease the pains of work / and rise again to make a life.” 

The reconciliation he wants with his roots goes back even further than Kansas and his father, as evidenced in the ekphrastic “The Watchmaker in the Rue Dauphine.” An early 20th Century photograph of a French watchmaker, busy at his craft, surrounded by the small but important things that go into his creations, is an archetype of the machine shop. The watchmaker represents a tradition of solitary artisanship, seemingly isolated from the machine shop in Kansas, but Fairchild can still say of them both, “This is the world. All there is of it.” The watchmaker’s shop and the machine shop exist in unworried ignorance of each other, but in Fairchild’s measure they are the same kind of place: a site of work, of artisanship, for the creation of things both beautiful and useful.

And so I slip my actual yardstick back into the closet and close the door. Another day, perhaps, I will need it. Until then I’ll have An Ordinary Life on the shelf in my office, a reminder of the need for solidarity. For now the book’s as crisp and clean as the administrative policy proposal I’m drafting for the review of my company’s board of directors, an exemplar of craft and a thing of beauty, and even practicality, if the board will care to see it. 

This review was originally published November 21, 2023 at The Drunken Odyssey.

[Nadia Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE WATER BALLET From a balcony where Brahms spills from a speaker, I watch the midday sun sprawl across this blue pool, this chlorinated heaven whose clouds hang deep below and darken near the end where the drain waits for winter. Around the edge, legs dangling, our sons and daughters murmur and fuss like new starlings fluttering among spring trees. At some hidden signal, they stand, spread their thin brown arms, touch hands, and fly into the sun.

[Michael Fuhrman]

“my box of tools kept oiled and free from rust, my steel-toed boots and fine bronze cutting torch, a welding unit good as new, and a pickup truck with a bed where he can sleep, dream, ease the pains of work, and rise again to make a life. A life.”

“rather lifted it in the way of his father scanning the sky in silent prayer for the grace of rain abundant upon his doomed soybeans or St. Francis blessing sparrows or the air itself, eyes radiant with Truth and Jesus, and said, Babydoll, I would walk on my tongue from here to Amarillo just to wash her dishes.”

“where he would fall asleep in sermons preached to aid his resurrection from a foxhole's grave.
But the stone would not budge, and he stood with my mother for photos outside the church and apologized for breaking up the Eucharist,”

“people forever lost in the great puzzle of their lives, going home, or wanting to go home, or perhaps walking to the nearest bar, as I am, for it is for many a kind of home, where the voice of Patsy Cline rises from the jukebox and kind faces emerge slowly from the dark, and I say, hi mom, hello father, hello my excellent sister, hello my doomed and incurably sad son.”

[Zuska · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the first section of this collection best; the prose poems went by me. I understand they are written in the voice of an alter ego the author has used before, so maybe I’m just missing some context. I especially liked “Welder,” “Poem Beginning With A Rejected Line By W.H.Auden,” “Allegory,” “Revenge,” and “My Father, Fighting The Fascists In WWII.” The latter poem and “Allegory” are a pair sadly well-suited to our present time.

This is a good collection, and makes me want to seek out other work by this poet.

[David Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to like a poet who chooses Edward Hopper paintings for his book jackets. Fairchild, an acquaintance of mine around Claremont, Calif., makes poetry out of unexpected moments: browsing at the local record store, say, or his childhood fandom for a baseball player after learning from his baseball card that they share a birthday. And he can tell a story that ends with a joke or a tug at the heart.

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems. The first section was my favorite with lovely, evocative, wispy words that conjured up full stories; great stuff. The second section was prose poems which I seem to have no patience with. The final section lost me. That is the story of poems.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poems set in middle America, celebrating a stark and beautiful landscape as well as ordinary people of the poet/speaker's life who lived unseen lives of wonder and devotion. I especially liked the poems which feature the speaker's father, a welder and poet of fire and metal.

[Karlan · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was a pleasure to read the latest collection from an award winning poet. There are stories, humor, and sadness to be found here. The father and son poems appealed to me especially.

[The_J · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Often the dying ask for a map"

[Sophie Rasmus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m not sure why it took me so long to get to BH Fairchild, but I’m here. Holy shit.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

if there was any justice in the world, i would be able to give this book six stars 🙌🏽

[emma cheaney · Rating 5 out of 5]

gorgeous. i love the titles of all the poems

[Trynce Brandt · Rating 4 out of 5]

this should be 4.5 stars