Trumbull Ave.

by Michael Lauchlan

The well-crafted lines in Michael Lauchlan's Trumbull Ave. are peopled by welders, bricklayers, gas meter readers, nurses, teachers, cement masons, and street kids. Taken together, they evoke a place―Detroit―in its bustling working-class past and changeable present moment. Lauchlan works in the narrative tradition of Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson but takes more recent influence from Philip Levine, Thomas Lux, and Ellen Voigt in presenting first- and third-person meditations on work, mortality, romance, childish exuberance, and the realities of time.

Lauchlan presents snapshots from the past―a widowed mother bakes bread during the Depression, a welder sends his son to war in the 1940s, a bounding dog runs into a chaotic street in 1981, and a narrator visits a decaying Victorian house in 1993―with an impressive raw simplicity of language and a regular, unrhymed meter. Lauchlan pays close attention to work in many settings, including his own classroom, a plumber's damp cellar, a nurse's hospital ward, and a waitress's Chinese restaurant dining room. He also astutely observes the natural world alongside the built environment, bringing city pheasants, elm trees, buzzing cicadas, starry skies, and long grass into conversation with his narrators' interior and exterior landscapes.

Lauchlan's poems reveal the layered complexity of human experiences in vivid, relatable characters and recurrent themes that feel both familiar and serious. All readers of poetry will enjoy the musical and vivid verse in Trumbull Ave.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2015

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t like this quite as much as the other Made in Michigan books I’ve read, but Lauchlan does a good job of contrasting pastoral and post-industrial views of Detroit through free verse, as in “Detroit Pheasant,” the poem that gives the collection its cover image. (Indeed, it was the cover that first drew me to the book.) Here’s my favorite lines:

“What an odd place to put a ballpark, this earth,
her plates’ slow fluidity dwarfing us
as we scramble home from second on a hit.” (from “Hospital Cafeteria”)

Also in the Made in Michigan series:
Strings Attached by Diane DeCillis (poetry)
Quality Snacks by Andy Mozina (short stories)
Making Callaloo in Detroit by Lolita Hernandez (short stories)

[Suzze Tiernan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't read a lot of poetry, although for a few years in high school I loved to write it. But, the local connection to this collection of free verse really called me. It is great, and I will be thinking about many of the themes for days. My faves: "Elm" which reminded me of the majestic elms that used to line so many Detroit streets (in my memory Hubbell especially) before disease took them, and "Repair".

[John Jeffire · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Nathan Englander’s short story “The Twenty-seventh Man,” a doomed prisoner tells his fellow captives moments before execution, “The desperate are never given the choice.” In Michael Lauchlan’s poetry collection “Trumball Ave.,” we are shown beautiful, tragic moments, snapshots of an older Detroit that was at once brutal and noble, and like the working class people who live inside these poems, we have no choice but to read, see, and experience, knowing that the poet has at some point lived every one of his words. In the poem “Milk, 1933,” a mother overwhelmed at the reality of having the heat turned off on her family momentarily hands one of her children to the stunned meterman, overcome at the impossibility of her circumstances. The moment is comic, desperate, painful and life-affirming all at once, captured with Kodak clarity. Given the choice, read this book. Michael Lauchlan will show you the hidden rooms of the old family house long since torn down, offering you the chance to walk through a collection of personal mementos both sacred and somehow known to everyone.

[Tom Romig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Curiosity, acceptance, endurance, and the joys and sorrows of daily life burst forth in these lyrical poems. The presence and pull of generations past and generations becoming deepen these poems in subtle and startling ways, leaving the reader with a sense of the dignity and complexity and mysteriousness of life. Read them aloud for their rhythmic beauty.