Setting the World in Order

by Rick Campbell, Robert A. Fink (Introduction)

Rick Campbell’s journey from the banks of the Ohio to the beaches of Florida is a rhapsody, and the music he makes in ordering his world takes us with him, to the headwaters of a new river."Rick Campbell’s poems leave some sweet dirt under your fingernails— proof of hard, honest work when the longing of small-town America is not enough. Setting the World in Order eloquently plots our geographically impossible trajectories. On the way, Campbell can lay down a narrative as spacious as the range of a blues harmonica, every gritty riff dissolving into compassion."—Dionisio D. Martínez"Rick Campbell’s poems move with grace and muscle and music from the Catholic working class of his youth, its factories and foundries, along the rivers of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida, and through the lives of the flesh-and-blood characters of contemporary America. Part prayer, part song, part gritty story, they always dance with meaning and significance; they always wholly embrace the idea of individual presence in a terrible, beautiful world."—Frank X. GasparFrom Harmonica LessonGo with the rhythmtill you can’t get off the track.Like this. Tight-belly staccato,hands cutting and freeing the air,one hard-held bottom line. Play betweentrains. Keep the wheels in mind.Catch the next one and play all night.In the morning try the whistle. You’ve earned it.It should sound like Kansas. Setting the World in Order is the tenth winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry, selected by Robert Fink of Hardin-Simmons University, editor of the Walt McDonald First-Book Series.

83 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2001

About the author

Rick Campbell was the director of Anhinga Press for twenty years and is the founding director of the Florida Literary Arts Coalition and its Other Words Conference. He teaches in the Sierra Nevada College low residency MFA program and also teaches English at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida.

He has won a Pushcart prize, an NEA fellowship in poetry, and two poetry fellowships from the Florida Arts Council. Poems and essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Florida Review, Prairie Schooner, Fourth River, Kestrel, Puerto Del Sol, New Madrid and other journals.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads database.

For the Trident series author, see Rick Campbell.

Reviews

[Dale Lehman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I met Rick Campbell at the 2023 Indie Lit Festival in Frostburg, Maryland. After a lifetime of largely not getting poetry, I'm finally trying to teach myself to get it, so I picked up his book while there. It's a fascinating collection, probably more meaningful to someone with a background more like Campbell's than mine, but no less absorbing for it. These are poems of working class America born along the industrial rivers of Pennsylvania and Ohio, picking up threads in Florida and Viet Nam and elsewhere. They speak of hardship, love, loss, and resilience in language that fits the land that birthed them.

That wasn't my life, but I feel I now know more of it and maybe can relate to it more readily. Which I suppose is something poetry does for us. When done well, it crosses divides and helps bring us together. And here it is indeed done well.