Usher: Poems

by B. H. Fairchild

Overview

"Meaty, maximalist, driven by narrative, [Fairchild] stakes out an American mythos."—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

From Manhattan to the rural Midwest—one of our most distinguished poets offers a verbal cinema of America. Employing dramatic monologues, among other forms, Usher embraces a range of subject matter and modes, from the elegiac to the comic. At its heart, however, is the long poem “Trilogy,” consisting of three interrelated dramatic monologues spoken by a circus performer, a theological student and part-time usher, and Hart Crane. A Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of 2009.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393338942
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/01/2010
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

B. H. Fairchild is the author of seven volumes of poetry, including The Blue Buick and Usher. A finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Bobbitt National Prize, he lives in California.

Editorial Reviews

"Fairchild's singular distinction is his ability to make people and incidents in his work more actual than any, it seems, in any other kind of writing."

Booklist

"The energetic and vivid poems of Usher are a delight . . . even those who approach poetry with trepidation will be mesmerized."

Sacramento Book Review

Over two decades and five books, Fairchild, a native Midwesterner, has built a loyal highbrow following for deft compositions that depict, with wit, pathos and regret, the ordinary lives of modern Americans-a dispossessed Great Plains farmer; a young Jewish New Yorker working as a movie theater usher, who comes to terms with Christian theology; Doris Miller of Clyde, Missouri, "on evening break at Wal-Mart"; a pool room full of Texas college students drinking while thinking about higher math. All those characters turn up in this new collection; so does a set of prose poems devoted to classic B-movies, and another about "The Beauty of Abandoned Towns." Other poems play philosophical games, as in the monologue spoken by the barber (famous in mathematical circles) who shaves all and only those barbers who do not shave themselves. Even there, however, everything intellectual becomes at last accessible, as if all ideas took place on "some vast, flat plain of pure event where things/ just happen." Fairchild pays homage, by name, to the grim, witty Anthony Hecht, but his own compositions, suffused with prairie sadness, could easily appeal to the broader audience for, say, Garrison Keillor or Ted Kooser. (May)

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