Introduction by Anthony Hecht

80 pp, ISBN 1-904130-02-X, £8.95 (Cloth only), UK Publication, October 31st, 2002

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A note about The Art of the Lathe B.H. Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe is one of the most distinguished collections of verse to have appeared in recent years. Amongst the many awards and honours to have come its way are:   1999 William Carlos Williams Award 1999 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award 1999 California Book Award 1999 Natalie Ornish Poetry Award 1999 PEN Center USA West Poetry Award 1998 National Book Award Finalist 1997 Beatrice Hawley Award 1996 Capricorn Poetry Award In their citation, the judges of the National Book Award said: “B.H. Fairchild risks ugliness to find poetry – yet the ease with which these poems reveal the music in the earthbound cadence of factory life is thrilling and utterly convincing. The Art of the Lathe is a paean to the thwarted desires and ‘terrible beauty’ of laborers, a superbly nuanced meditation on those who have wrested, from the detritus of machine work and assembly line toil, the satisfaction of a 'small thing done well.' Time and again Fairchild demonstrates that there's no scintillation without grit." In 2002 Fairchild was awarded the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters – a prize recognizing “consistent excellence over a long career” – and the judges’ citation reads, in part, as follows: “The mysteries of the explicit, the angelic powers of information, the art in work, the layered, intricate craving for grace in American life – B.H. Fairchild has mastered these materials in an encompassing, meticulous poetry worthy of its place in the traditions of Whitman and Melville. Respectful, unsentimental, his The Art of the Lathe penetrates to the nexus of art and labor with an authority informed by grace.”

A note on B.H. Fairchild B.H. Fairchild was born in Houston, Texas and grew up there and in small towns in west Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. He attended the University of Kansas and University of Tulsa and now lives with his wife and daughter in Claremont, California. As well as receiving the awards listed above, Fairchild has been given Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, a California Arts Grant, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship to the Sewanee Writers Conference, a National Writers’ Union First Prize, and an AWP Anniversary Award. His poetry collections include Local Knowledge, The System of Which the Body Is One Part, and Flight. He is also the author of Such Holy Song, a study of William Blake. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Hudson Review, Salmagundi, The Sewanee Review and other journals.

Praise for The Art of the Lathe "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." -- Kate Daniels, 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 (from the Introduction) "B.H. Fairchild boldly plunders the territories of prose to expand the possibilities of contemporary verse. . . .These fluent poems are omnivorously intelligent. The reader never knows what will come next; but, as deeply psychological in their probings as a novel, they always cohere." -- Dana Gioia "These remarkably textured, generous, haunting poems articulate the absence and longing that are created by experience and that in turn keep experience alive. Anyone who wishes to understand not only the contemporary American idiom but the reasons for that idiom will have to read B.H. Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe." -- Wyatt Prunty "James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus spoke of forging the conscience of his race in the smithy of his soul; in the dusty light of a Kansas machine shop, B.H. Fairchild has performed similar magic."  -- R.S. Gwynn "B.H. Fairchild risks ugliness to find poetry -- yet the ease with which these poems reveal the music in the earthbound cadence of factory life is thrilling and utterly convincing. The Art of the Lathe is a paean to the thwarted desires and 'terrible beauty' of laborers, a superbly nuanced meditation on those who have wrested, from the detritus of machine work and assembly line toil, the satisfaction of a 'small thing done well.' Time and again Fairchild demonstrates that there's no scintillation without grit."   -- the National Book Award Judges' Citation "The mysteries of the explicit, the angelic powers of information, the art in work, the layered, intricate craving for grace in American life -- B.H. Fairchild has mastered these materials in an encompassing, meticulous poetry worthy of its place in the traditions of Whitman and Melville. Respectful, unsentimental, his The Art of the Lathe penetrates to the nexus of art and labor with an authority informed by grace." -- Citation, Arthur Rense Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters

Reviews of The Art of the Lathe "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 backs." -- David C. Ward, PN Review

From The Art of the Lathe Two Photographs   Winter light, a white frame house filling the background as in a dream – the bare branches of a cottonwood, a piece of sky. In the foreground, my father as a young man, and a car, a Packard. His body drapes the body of the car, back pressed against the door, elbows rigid on the window’s lower edge, leg bent, polished Florsheim resting on the running board. He holds a cigarette with a particular grace or perhaps feigned casualness, smoke curling up along the right sideburn. The hair was slicked back only moments before, and the head is bowed slightly as he gazes almost shyly into the eye of the shutter. Winter light. It rises from his white shirt in the way of Hopper paintings, the hard, floating light. It is there, too, in the second photograph where I lean against my car: cigarette, sleeves twice-rolled to where the forearm’s lower muscle just begins, the hair sleekly dark, a thin wire of anxiety disturbing the eyebrows. White house, tree, sky, this odd, surrounding bareness that is everything I want to leave, and already I see the highway narrowing to the vanishing point past the GANO grain elevators and Methodist church spires until Kansas is only a sea of brown fields diminishing in the rearview mirror. The light in its long evolution toward my father and his son: the eye of the shutter opens, two white shirts burn in a black box, burn still under lamplight, and a car approaches the horizon.   Old Men Playing Basketball The heavy bodies lunge, the broken language of fake and drive, glamorous jump shot slowed to a stutter. Their gestures, in love again with the pure geometry of curves, rise toward the ball, falter, and fall away. On the boards their hands and fingertips tremble in tense little prayers of reach and balance. Then, the grind of bone and socket, the caught breath, the sigh, the grunt of the body laboring to give birth to itself. In their toiling and grand sweeps, I wonder, do they still make love to their wives, kissing the undersides of their wrists, dancing the old soft-shoe of desire? And on the long walk home from the VFW, do they still sing to the drunken moon? Stands full, clock moving, the one in army fatigues and houseshoes says to himself, pick and roll, and the phrase sounds musical as ever, radio crooning songs of love after the game, the girl leaning back in the Chevy’s front seat as her raven hair flames in the shuddering light of the outdoor movie, and now he drives, gliding toward the net. A glass wand of autumn light breaks over the backboard. Boys rise up in old men, wings begin to sprout at their backs. The ball turns in the darkening air. ©