driftless's Full Review: Michael Mcgriff - Dismantling the Hills
Judging poetry is inherently challenging. As with any true art form, the viewer’s point of view and biases are such a large part of the experience that people are frequently going to disagree when critiquing a given work. I even think it’s difficult to describe why I like a particular poem, but poetry about the natural world or ordinary people in a plain spoken style is often what catches my attention.
In Dismantling the Hills, Michael McGriff – a lecturer in the Stanford English Department – touches these notes repeatedly in an award winning seventy page book of twenty-four poems published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2008. He uses details from the natural and industrial world found around his hometown of Coos Bay, Oregon to focus on emotional topics like his aging family, physical labor, death, decay, poverty and economic decline. The poems vary in length from one to several pages and are organized in no discernible pattern. Speaking primarily in the first person, McGriff often captures a moment in time or a particular life episode, using it as a structure from which to examine deeper issues.
“My chainsaw touched a whole world of yellow jackets in a beetle-rotten stump and my skin went tight. I lay facedown in the duff after the crew boss shot me full of something he kept in his saw bag.”
I enjoyed the poems in this book, reading a couple at a time over a few weeks. McGriff makes remarkably efficient use of straight-forward language to express complicated feelings and emotions. I often found myself re-reading poems, exploring each one, trying to fully decipher the scene and admiring his concision.
“Let a cormorant measure the arc of my love. When it comes, let the insistent rot fill the sockets of our skulls until we are pared to dark feathers.”
Dismantling the Hills was honored with the 2007 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, which is awarded yearly to recognize an emerging poet’s first book length publication. I’m not sure that this fact matters much to an embarrassingly inexperienced poetry reader like myself, but I found the poems captivating, intriguing and worth the effort. The author tackles some of the more depressing aspects of the human experience, but does so in a pleasingly quiet and graceful style that cleverly veils the many powerful emotions within.
In case you are wondering, this review is both Lean-N-Mean.
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