Dismantling the Hills by Michael McGriffUniversity of Pittsburgh Press, 2008

These are poems from a world I don’t know, the Pacific Northwest of small towns and the lumber industry: paper mills and logging roads, slash piles, steam donkeys, choker setters, the narrator and his father bucking timber. It’s desolate beauty or sometimes just desolation, staying, stuck. “I could say I left town for both of us,” the narrator of “Iron” says, but then, later in the poem, admits, “But I never left” (p 1). I like “Ash and Silt,” the images of it: “the smell of orange peels and cinnamon,” shortening and pine pitch (p 6). Nature in these poems is on the verge of taking over, and is something dark: “Here comes the mineral strangle/of roots, clay bleeding down,” starts one poem (p 9). “Mother Expanding from the Piano, the Light, the Whales (1)” captures nowhere-town quiet, dust and fading light, minor key. “My Uncle Would Visit” is a pleasing story-poem, and I love, too, the first lines of “Entering the Kingdom,” the image of a wet November afternoon, “the gray machines/of the rain” (p 27). My favorite poem is “Coos Bay,” a string of images to make a town: “The World’s Largest Lumber Port,” a sign announces in the first line, then “Japanese glass floats, cranberry bogs/mooring lines, salmon roe,/swing shifts, green chain, millwrights” (p 11). My next-favorite poem in this collection is “Brief Elegy on the Tip of a Match,” the simple grace of it, the wonderful image of “the leaves going silver/like fish changing direction” (p 33). Also satisfying is “Shift Change, 9 A.M.,” with its all-night diner, where “canisters of toothpicks rattle/as a log truck rumbles past” (p 55). You can listen to the author read a slightly different version of “Brief Elegy on the Tip of a Match here, and hear him read a slightly different version of “Coos Bay” here.