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.

The Weather Fifteen Years Ago, Wolf Haas

Translated by Stephanie Gilardi and Thomas S. Hansen

“I think that's...pretty wonderful.  That someone even pays attention to the weather of the past. The weather is the kind of thing you’re only interested in to know it’s going to be tomorrow.”

I’ve never read a book quite like The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas. It doesn’t proceed in any typical sort of narrative, but instead is simply a conversation between an author and a book reviewer. That’s it. Back and forth, chatting. Sometimes trivial, sometimes bitter, but always, back and forth. It should be boring as hell, but it’s wonderful.

When I first began the book, I wasn’t sure I could tolerate the style. Then I became hooked, on both the underlying story and the snarky conversation of the two. Over the course of several days, the reviewer and author meet and discuss different elements of the story. The reviewer questions the use of certain words and phrases, asks why characters behave as they do, and generally tries to get the author to admit to certain prejudices in the story (regarding women, national culture, etc). The author, for his part, gives new meaning to the term “unreliable narrator”, because you never really know if it’s the author Haas or a character created by Haas who is beguilingly called Hass (who happens to be an author). It’s really not as confusing as it sounds!

The book they discuss is the account of a man who is obsessed with the weather at the resort he stayed in as a child, where all kinds of influential events took place. Even as he seems to forget the place, the habit remains: he finds out the weather and keeps track. The story is told backwards, and characters are introduced randomly that fill out the plot and keep it lively. Yet, it has to be remembered…as interesting as their conversation is, there is no book for you to pick up to read. The interview is the book. It’s an entirely different way of reading, because every detail has to be discerned by direct (or offhand) comments by the speakers. It’s almost like eavesdropping on a juicy story.

And while it’s clever and witty, it’s also sort of profound. Haas describes the complexities of writing and creating characters:

“You can’t tell everything about a person and still make them appealing. People are appealing because you don’t know too much about them.”


“After all, I think that for the purposes of the book, having one defined direction is more dynamic than multiple compass points. I always say that artifice begins with symmetry.”

The reviewer tries to draw out intentions from Haas that may or may not exist, and provokes him a bit as she tries to uncover sentiments that she senses are there. Thus they discuss the ways people interpret and misconstrue plot and character elements. Essentially, this is two stories in one: the interview, and the plot of the book that you’ll never get to read. When you finish, you actually feel bummed out that you can’t go and order it immediately.

Special thanks to Ariadne Press for the Review Copy.

The Alchemist's Kitchen, Susan Rich (poetry)

The Alchemist's Kitchen, by Susan Rich, published by White Pine Press (http://www.whitepine.org/).

To say that this compilation is a lovely and simple collection would be false.  "Simple" could be taken to mean childlike, or unsophisticated, which it most certainly isn't.  By simple I mean that the poetry is understandable and personal, not so cluttered and overly nuanced that it becomes incapable of eliciting emotion.

Emotion abounds in this collection, which is divided into three parts:  Incantation, Transformation and Song.  Each section has its own beauty, and there is a delicate feel that at times becomes jagged and pointed, enough to make you sit up and re-read the stanza.  This is not a poetry book to sit back and feel relaxed by, but rather one to slowly meditate upon.

The people drawn within it are complicated:  in one moment trying to determine if a noise is simply thunder or an airstrike, while choosing what breakfast cereal to eat.  They carefully choose a lipstick for a dance that may be their last.  They discuss their travels with a dying parent whose only journey is from hospital bed to bath.  They are painful and yet some are light and airy.

One of my favorites:  from Song,
"You Might Consider"

how my long life of losing men
could create a new international sport.

Men lost in the desert, men missing
in action from doorways and all night diners;

men making the most of fire
escapes, service stairs, the emergency aisle

of airplanes like United.  Men
para-sailing after spaceship encounters.

I am accomplished in the world
of the see-you-later save

as his pick up truck disappears
traveling on to the next espresso stand.

Something in the curve of my collar,
the cut of my blouse sets them running.

They know they are in the hands of a master.
But when the coffee's on, the pumpernickel

toasted just right, I have to let them know;
I'm actually ready to let them go."  p.87

In "Transcendence", she uses the musical phrase,
"plastic curtains ecstatic as castanets."  Words like that are mesmerizing, and I kept finding segments equally unique and beautiful, compiling an instant mental picture.

In some of the poems she discusses the genocide in Srebrenica, and at times she refers to a 'Sarajevo Rose'.  I had to look that up, and I've included a picture (above).  A Sarajevo Rose is the location of a mortal shell attack that killed some one, some person, some individual that meant more than just a mark on the pavement.  The damaged area is then filled with red wax, as a rememberance.  That strange mix of memory and horror with a tiny dash of shocking color is what too many have lived through, and in a lyrical way Rich manages to link her poems with that same emotional impact.