The Blue Buick

Gathering works from five of B. H. Fairchild's previous volumes stretching over thirty years, and adding twenty-six brilliant new poems, The Blue Buick showcases the career of a poet who represents "the American voice at its best: confident and conflicted, celebratory and melancholic" (The New York Times). Fairchild's poetry covers a wide range, both geographically and intellectually, though it finds its centre in the rural Midwest: in oilfields and dying small towns, in taverns, baseball fields, one-screen movie theatres and skies "vast, mysterious and bored." Ultimately, its cultural scopewhere Mozart stands beside Patsy Cline, with Grunewald, Gdel and Rothko only a subway ride from the Hollywood films of the 1950stranscends region and decade to explore the relationship of memory to the imagination and the mysteries of time and being. And finally there is the character of Roy Eldridge Garcia, a machinist/poet/philosopher who sees in the landscape and silence of the high plains the held breath of the earth, "as if we haven't quite begun to exist. That coming into being still going on."