cover image The Blue Buick: New and Selected Poems

The Blue Buick: New and Selected Poems

B.H. Fairchild. Norton, $29.95 (332p) ISBN 978-0-393-24026-9

The working-class men of Great Plains small towns face the literary past and the uneasy American future in the moving, pellucid, expertly assembled lines of Fairchild, winner of National Book Critics Circle Award for Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (2002). Youth in Kansas, Oklahoma, and West Texas, as well as small-town isolation and blue-collar pride, animate most of his scenes. Fairchild, who teaches at the University of North Texas, also weaves single poems together into an expanding whole: the title poem, for example, introduces Fairchild's star-crossed mentor, Roy Elridge Garcia, as "the only man my father hired again/ after he showed up drunk." Garcia, who died of complications from epilepsy, also attempted a literary career, and so Fairchild, as an homage, reprints Garcia's own prose poems, which in fact Fairchild wrote: Garcia is an invented character, though realistically described. Other characters include "redneck surrealist/ who, drunk, one Friday night tried to hold up the local 7-Eleven/ with a caulking gun," and the "hitchhiker sick to death of hunger," who alongside the poet himself, was "cutting weeds and sunflowers on the shoulder." Fairchild's story-oriented style wears its considerable learning lightly; this sixth collection, his first new-and-selected, might break him out of the critics'-darling status that has long seemed inappropriate for such a democratic voice. (Aug.)