B. H. Fairchild

This 2003 offering from crusty Texan B. H. Fairchild goes straight to the top shelf of contemporary American verse. Fairchild's voice effortlessly combines the lyrical with the gritty, marrying a Westerner's laconic fatalism to the inchoate yearnings of the true romantic. Lonesome plains, deserted roads, tall tales, cars, jazz, baseball, liquor, sex…Early Occult is a fever dream of a lost America, the one that fell between the armrests of a beer-stained movie theater in Topeka, Kansas show more circa 1953, just before the fall. show less

There were some gems in here, don’t get me wrong (the title poem The Blue Buick is masterful), but if I read one more poem about lathes, I was going to toss this over the ridge. I get it, you are a mid-western, blue-eyed, blue collar bloke who has cashed in on all that HARD WORK to sit on his ass and write poems now. Good for you. It was like a Bob Seger album without the benefit of a band.

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