Rowing Inland

by Jim Daniels

Rowing Inland, Jim Daniels's fifteenth book of poetry is a time machine that takes the reader back to the Metro Detroit of his youth and then accelerates toward the future. With humor and empathy, the author looks at his own family's challenges and those of the surrounding community where the legacy handed down from generation to generation is one of survival. The economic hits that this community has to endure create both an uncertainty about its future and a determined tenacity.

Divided into four sections, Rowing Inland calls out key moments from the author's life. The events that inspire many of these poems took place a long time ago and often it has taken the poet his entire life to write about those experiences and write about them with the necessary emotional distance. For example, some of the poems in the section "Late Invocation for Magic" reference the first girl he ever kissed and her accidental death by fire. In the last section of the book, Daniels approaches the current political and social standings in Detroit with lines like, "The distance to Baghdad or Kandahar / is measured in rowboat coffins / while here in the fatty palm of The Mitten / minor skirmishes electrify tedium." Although it focuses on Detroit's metropolitan area, the book can be considered a snapshot of working-class life anywhere across the country. Daniels casts his lens on a way of life that is often distorted or ignored by the powers that be. He zooms in on street level where all the houses may look alike but each holds its own secrets and dreams.

To paraphrase novelist and screenwriter Richard Price, Detroit is the "zip code for [Daniels's] heart"-a place that his writing will always come back to. Readers of contemporary poetry with a regional persuasion will enjoy this collection.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published February 6, 2017

About the author

James Raymond Daniels (born 1956 in Detroit, Michigan) is an American poet and writer. Like his father and many of his friends, Daniels worked for the Ford Motor Company before college. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Alma College in 1978 and a master’s degree from Bowling Green State University in 1980. In his writing, he addresses the issues of blue collar work, adolescence, and determining the role of a poet. The factories proved a setting for many of his poems, which describe the hardships factory workers face.

Since 1981, Daniels has been on the faculty of the creative writing program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is the Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English. The majority of Daniels' papers can be found within the Special Collections department of Michigan State University's main library.

Daniels' literary works have been recognized and highlighted at Michigan State University in their Michigan Writers Series. He won the inaugural Brittingham Prize in Poetry in 1985 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Reviews

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are very place-based, from Jim Daniels' childhood up through experiences as a teen and adult, in a Detroit already headed toward obliteration. Imagine Eminem's uncle, living a few streets up from 8 Mile, his parents hard-working factory workers, and that seems about right.

As I was going through the collection, I found something to like on almost every page. So here are some of the top highlights:

Welcome to Warren
III. Hidden Beauty
9.
"This won't hurt. It'll just
kill you. On this church
I shall build my rock.
Upsidedownville is conducting
a recount, demanding the beer
and the chair, offering only
the Elusive Smirk in exchange...."

And how's this for a childhood:
Welcome to Warren
VI. The End of Childhood
"The gentle stench of poisoned weeds
the absence of stately trees, adult supervision
wide, flat factories
and the chemical tar of their parking lots.
Gearless bicycles and greasy rags
and rolled-up T-shirts, the foreign tenderness
of girls we shied away from, then dreamt about...."

Crayola Trailer Park Eight-Pack
"....Prayer: subtle opaque blue murmur.
Creates mirages. Erases as it goes."

Quitting the Day Job in the Middle Ages
"...Here in the Rust Belt of the Flyover States

I fill out my forms, press hard
on my memorized numbers.

That sound you hear is either
the sound of the drain sucking down

the last bit of moisture
or milk telling lies to my cereal."

You can see the poet read from this collection on YouTube.

(Thanks to the publisher for sending an eGalley through Edelweiss, which I saved for National Poetry Month.)

[Sean Kottke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This poetry collection has the bare-knuckled autobiographical feel of Bukowski transplanted to Warren, Michigan, with a disciplined subtlety muting some of the late L.A. poet's deliberate artlessness. There are a few opaque verses here, but on the whole, a visceral sense of place and a meta-narrative tying together the lives of the poems' working-class subjects emerges indelibly.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably this book is one good edit from being a great book--it's a bit long, some of the poems a bit loose in a talky kind of way, but when Daniels is at the top of his game (as he is often) his poems are simple, eloquent, unassumming, unpretentious, and memorable.

[Sandy D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dark, coarse, and powerful poems about coming of age in Detroit, and aging in Warren (a blue collar suburb), from a decidedly male perspective. Family, dead-end jobs, poverty, accidents, and city streets and neighborhoods.

[Bill DeGenaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Happy to hear the news that JD's poems come back to Detroit and its suburbs in ROWING INLAND. His last 4-5 collections have told other stories about other places. I couldn't help but remember twenty years ago, reading copies of PUNCHING OUT and M-80 from Youngstown State's library, teaching comp (for the first time) by day and working at the YMCA by night and pretty much having those world united by JD's poems--about factory workers in Detroit, kids unsure whether they'd be blue- or white-collar workers but pretty sure it'd be the former, and the ones I found most compelling: the ones about young people temporarily working blue-collar jobs. Those really resonated as I cleaned locker rooms and bathrooms on the night shift and crossed my fingers about the PhD applications I had just sent out.

ROWING INLAND is a return to the subject matter of old but now de-industrialized has really taken hold. There's even more melancholy. There are narrators who seem very autobiographical: folks returning to Metro Detroit, looking around and shaking their heads while moving parents out of the old neighborhood, etc. But fond (kind of) memories, too. And all in vivid idiom. Like this: "Our ice cream man was Mr. Softee / not Mr. Lofty. He got busted / for settling pot not popsicles. / We used to make mud pies like everybody else / but we got over it. If you've got a clear puddle / why add mud and stir it up..." It's punchy as hell. Five stars for sure.

[Timons Esaias]

I am a long-time admirer of Jim Daniels's work, prose and poetry, and was happy to hear the familiar voice in "Customs" (the prose-poemy frontispiece piece) and "Wishbone" and many of the poems in the first two-thirds of this collection. Most of the poems are looking back to early years in Detroit, with clear images, direct narrations, and they throw solid punches. I was especially happy, because I recently went through his other collection from 2017, which put me off. Those poems were as skilled as always, but gave me a strong phony-as-a-three-dollar-bill vibe, that I can't entirely explain.

The poems closer to the end of this one started running in that same direction, so I had a mixed reaction to the book as a whole. Poets, however, are allowed to change, and maybe I'm just not ready to follow what seems to be a new direction of some sort. Hmmm.

I'd still check out this book, though. It has great strength. (But maybe leave Street Calligraphy on the shelf.)

Best snide line: "If memory were a contest, the liars would win." (from "Welcome to Warren")