Steel Valley by Michael Adams, poetry and short prose

  “Maybe it’s all for the better. You weigh the clean air and water, the way the rivers have come back to life, against the boarded up storefronts, abandoned downtowns, suicides and divorces, low wage jobs or no jobs at all….I don’t have the heart to balance the scales of misery and hope and come up with an answer.”

Thus writes Michael Adams in his poetry and short prose collection, Steel Valley. The collection is diverse, but most of it dwells with the historicity of Pennsylvania’s steel industry, one that had dominated the world up until the 1980s. It was known as the largest steel producing region in the world, one that supplied materials, iron, and armor to Union soldiers in the Civil War, and through the 60s and Vietnam (source: www.riversofsteel.com).

“Iron ran an endless river – to railroad cars, rolling mills, tanks, Camaros, refrigerators, machine guns. It was a river that ran while King and Kennedy were killed. A river that ran through the guns of the soldiers-kids like me….A river that ran in a bloody stream stretched halfway round the world to sear the flesh of men and women I would never know, but start another river running, redder and hotter than molten steel.” (from “Steel”, p. 17)

Besides providing work for generations, the industry made its own mark on the region. The valley likely imagined its steel domination as permanent, not foreseeing the devastation left in its decline. Adams similarly addresses human nature’s tendency to assume what is in place will always remain, allowing it to be taken for granted, instead of understanding that there’s always an end. In “Monongahela”, Adams describes his ambivalence about the river that twisted through the steel valley:

“Looking back now, forty years gone, my lack of curiosity about the river I lived with daily disappoints me. Maybe that’s the way of youth, to be fixated on origins and ends – things far off, the cold mountain spring, the distant sea, not the everyday….I carried with me in those days, before life touched me with failure and some sympathy, the hard stone of intolerance that the young may bear for the familiar, to mask their fear and uncertainty.”

I only wish I could show the enjambment he used to heighten the impact of his realization. He contrasts this with an appreciation for the hills he hiked, in a nod to Thoreau. “With friends, with lovers, or alone, but always with the woods, happy, broken-hearted or not knowing which, wandering the wild rugged hills.” (“I Went Out”, p 27)

My overall response to his collection is a sense of permanence, and how one person can be marked by a place no matter how far away from it they travel, literally or figuratively. It combines unsentimental reality with the fragile emotions of memories. His choice of vocabulary reflects the industrial scene and events:  concrete terms that instantly create an image. And too, he gives a sort of manly acknowledgement of the frailties of life; he picks up on the hardship suffered by the nameless faces we meet. He sums this up in “Do You See That Woman” on page 37:

“Okay, you’re young, and you’ve never had to face it, how it wears you down, the small daily humiliations that come at you from all directions, but here’s something you should know. Everybody wants to take pride in their work. Learn that one thing, really learn it, and you’ll do okay in life.”

This collection is published by Lummox Press, and is available through their website

 as well as on some online retailers. www.lummoxpress.com

Special thanks to RD Armstrong for the Review Copy.

Blue Has No South, Alex Epstein

Translated from Hebrew by Becka Mara McKay

I can't decide if these are short stories, lyric essays, or poems.  In any case, Epstein has compiled little moments of mystery and romance, history and humor, into this slim volume from Clockroot Books.  There are no dramatic flares, and no heartbreaking losses.  Instead, the situations and events he describes in these short pieces are simple, personal, and honest.  There is emotion, but the quiet kind endured by quiet people, an emotion that reads far more realistic than some authors can describe effectively.

In "Memory Card":

"In the winter they buy a digital camera as a surprise for the grandchildren, but they don't know how to connect it to the computer they bought the year before....the old couple takes pictures of each other.  In March the woman dies in her sleep.  Her husband finds the instruction manual that came with the camera and reads about pixels, about digital zoom, and jpeg and avi files, and other strange, miraculous concepts.  In May he finishes the instruction manual, and removes from the camera the 1-gigabyte memory card.  He places it in his deceased wife's jewelry box and closes the lid."  The picture he has created in so few words reveals the enthusiasm of this couple to share with their grandchildren, the shock of death, and the quiet picture of a man diligently trying to figure out how to save her face.  That he doesn't wish to share this "memory card" illuminates how deep his feelings are.  I could easily picture him in a chair, trying to decipher the jargon and afraid of messing something up and losing the photos forever.  Epstein puts all that into a deceptively simple little paragraph.

In "Another Way Out", he tells another picturesque story.
"A king once imprisoned a poet in a cellar and demanded he find the most beautiful word in the world.  This legend has infinite endings.  In one, the poet dreamed he carved the word on the cellar's ceiling. When he awoke, he didn't remember it-only that it was written in the font now called FrankRuehl.*  In another, the poet doesn't discover (even in a dream) a hint of the word.  All he manages, completely by accident, is to invent the game of chess."  It has a fairy tale quality, dungeon and all, but the revelation of finding the most complicated game, the game of kings, in a search for beauty, is somehow exactly right.

Alex Epstein breathes life into a variety of topics in this collection:  cosmonauts, lost cell phones, dreams, and an escaped elephant heading to another zoo in search of lost love.  They are quirky and youthful but lack the sarcasm and edginess that sometimes settles into modern verse.

Special thanks to Hilary Plum of Clockroot Books for the Advance Reading Copy.

*FrankRuehl font is the ubiquitous Hebrew font style. There are many fonts that belong to this style, and all are based on an early 20th-century design by Raphael Frank.   Interesting to note that this font, as well as the popular Arial font, are both representative of Hebrew origins in printing.
(From http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/family.aspx?FID=237)