The Arrival of the Future

by B.H. Fairchild

"Fairchild’s ability not only to choose a story but to pace it and to reveal its meaning through the unfolding of the narrative is probably unmatched in contemporary American poetry. The incisive psychology, the vividly descriptive diction, the large repertoire of vocabulary, the weightiness of his settings and plots: all these contribute to the delightful sensation that one is reading, simultaneously, the best poetry and best prose. I cannot think of another living poet capable of delivering such pleasure… Not since James Wright has there been a poet so skilled at representing the minds and imaginations of ordinary American working people.”
—The Southern Review

“With elegance and restrained subtlety, Mr. Fairchild interweaves topics that become something like musical themes, including the central theme of machine work… Anyone who can lay claim to the authorship of this much excellent poetry wins my unqualified and grateful admiration.”
—Anthony Hecht

“In an American culture which has always ignored or disdained class issues, Fairchild and Philip Levine are the only contemporary poets… who take work and the working class as their subjects… Almost throwbacks, like Steinbeck novels or Walker Evans photographs, Fairchild’s poems recover an America from which we have always turned our heads.”
—PN Review (England)

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

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

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, after reading Usher, Fairchild's most recent book of poetry, I had to go back and read this - his first. I've been holding onto this one for a bit, afraid to read it and have nothing else to read by him until he releases another collection. An odd thought, I suppose...

What I found most interesting in this collection was the few glances into the life of a movie theatre usher. Many of these, particularly the fifth section of "Kansas Avenue," seemed more powerful and more profound than the poems in his recent collection that focus on the same type of imagery/memory.

In a way, the rawness of this, his first collection, seems more genuine than the more practiced hand of his latest work. That is not a criticism, as I enjoyed Usher. I just like the immediacy and slightly more 'raw' feel of this earlier work.

He is a poet that can truly combine the boredom of growing up in small town middle America with an unmistakeable beauty. I wish that I could put thoughts into words the same way that he can.

I really try to avoid quoting too much in my poetry reviews and I'm not sure if I have ever quoted a full poem before (I'm sure I have - I just can't remember any instances...), but I feel the absolute need to on this one. I can't even tell you exactly why this one hit me like it did - and it has a different feel than much in the book - but I found it to be both beautiful and sinister and I love it.....

PHOTOGRAPH

In this one you are blind-folded,
long white dress with puffed sleeves
gathering light from the window behind you.
The wood floors you waxed are pools of ice.

Arms bent hesitantly, fingers curled,
you claw air and stumble at the carpet's edge.
No one will help you. Your mother, smiling,
bends backward as your hand sweeps near. Two uncles
blow smoke clouds and show their teeth. Your father frowns.
You, in this familiar room, the stranger, the awkward guest.

What is this game? How can I, years later,
dropping this battered photograph from a book
you left behind, not see the woman in the girl,
lost, light-filled in a dark room, bodies
dumb as ghosts, the hands starting into flight?

Edit:

Book fourteen of my reread project of 2019.

This one is an interesting one as far as this reread goes. First of all, I am glad to see that I left a full review when I first read this collection (Seriously, though, how can it already have been a full decade since I read this one? Time is a scary thing, I swear…). Second of all, though, I have some mixed feelings on this one.

I would rate this one lower now than I did ten years ago. Possibly even three stars instead of the five. I still very much enjoyed a lot of these poems but I didn’t feel them as much as I apparently did then. (That’s really concrete, isn’t it?) Many of the pages that I folded over would remain pristine if I were to read them now (though most of the lines that I deemed highlighter worthy still struck me). (I will also say that the poem that I quoted in full is probably still my favorite in the book but yeah – it isn’t really representative of the rest of the poems here…)

The one poem that I liked a lot more now than when I did on my initial read was The Limits of My Language: English 85B. It is a long one, so I won’t retype it here but this one hit me a lot harder than many of the other poems in the book. It is primarily about an older person going through dementia so I wonder if that is just a subject matter that is a little bit less removed for me in my mid 40s than it was in my mid 30s.

And that is what I keep coming back to with this one. How much does the age of the reader change the reaction to poems? I am sure that it can be quite a bit but I feel like it would depend a lot on the subject matter. Now, don’t get me wrong – a good poem is a good poem (well, that is a whole argument, and one that I could take multiple sides on I suppose, but I am sticking with that as a premise for now…) but how the reader reacts can definitely depend on how much the subject matter matters to them at the time. So, poems about the pursuits of a younger person may touch a young person more directly where as it would be more indirect and nostalgic for an older reader.

I am not sure that I one hundred percent believe what I am saying here, but it has been interesting to me in this reread which books have weathered the storm of this reader getting older and which ones have not as well. I am thinking about it a lot more with this one because I felt just a little bit let down by this one in the end.

I have always, probably unfairly, compared Fairchild to Levis. Having just finished Levis’ last book and then turning to Fairchild’s first makes that comparison even more unfair to Fairchild. And it is this progression that may have caused the problem more than anything else. In fact the last poem in the book, the titular poem, reminded me a good bit more of that fantastic Levis that I had just read – somehow meandering and frighteningly direct.

I have a much later Fairchild book on the list for this reread project as well. I am intrigued to see if that one will hold up better for me than this one did. (I also realized as I looked up this one to add to my review that I own Blue Buick and never reviewed it though I am fairly certain that I read it when it came out. I need to find my copy and see if I did indeed finish it…)

[Polly]

Recommended to me by the KC Metro Verse poetry group.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poems in this early book are not nearly as good as those in "The Art of the Lathe," or "Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest," which are both wonderful books.