{"id":390,"date":"2009-04-27T18:11:39","date_gmt":"2009-04-27T22:11:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=390"},"modified":"2009-04-27T18:11:39","modified_gmt":"2009-04-27T22:11:39","slug":"dismantling-the-hills-by-michael-mcgriffuniversity-of-pittsburgh-press-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/dismantling-the-hills-by-michael-mcgriffuniversity-of-pittsburgh-press-2008\/","title":{"rendered":"Dismantling the Hills by Michael McGriffUniversity of Pittsburgh Press, 2008"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>These are poems from a world I don&#8217;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&#8217;s desolate beauty or sometimes just desolation, staying, stuck. &#8220;I could say I left town for both of us,&#8221; the narrator of &#8220;Iron&#8221; says, but then, later in the poem, admits, &#8220;But I never left&#8221; (p 1). I like &#8220;Ash and Silt,&#8221; the images of it: &#8220;the smell of orange peels and cinnamon,&#8221; shortening and pine pitch (p 6). Nature in these poems is on the verge of taking over, and is something dark: &#8220;Here comes the mineral strangle\/of roots, clay bleeding down,&#8221; starts one poem (p 9).  &#8220;Mother Expanding from the Piano, the Light, the Whales (1)&#8221; captures nowhere-town quiet, dust and fading light, minor key. &#8220;My Uncle Would Visit&#8221; is a pleasing story-poem, and I love, too, the first lines of &#8220;Entering the Kingdom,&#8221; the image of a wet November afternoon, &#8220;the gray machines\/of the rain&#8221; (p 27). My favorite poem is &#8220;Coos Bay,&#8221; a string of images to make a town: &#8220;<em>The World&#8217;s Largest Lumber Port<\/em>,&#8221; a sign announces in the first line, then &#8220;Japanese glass floats, cranberry bogs\/mooring lines, salmon roe,\/swing shifts, green chain, millwrights&#8221; (p 11). My next-favorite poem in this collection is &#8220;Brief Elegy on the Tip of a Match,&#8221; the simple grace of it, the wonderful image of &#8220;the leaves going silver\/like fish changing direction&#8221; (p 33). Also satisfying is &#8220;Shift Change, 9 A.M.,&#8221; with its all-night diner, where &#8220;canisters of toothpicks rattle\/as a log truck rumbles past&#8221; (p 55).  You can <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fishousepoems.org\/archives\/michael_mcgriff\/brief_elegy_on_the_tip_of_a_match.shtml\">listen to the author read a slightly different version of &#8220;Brief Elegy on the Tip of a Match here<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fishousepoems.org\/archives\/michael_mcgriff\/coos_bay.shtml\">hear him read a slightly different version of &#8220;Coos Bay&#8221; here<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>These are poems from a world I don&#8217;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&#8217;s desolate beauty or sometimes just desolation, staying, stuck. &#8220;I could say I left town for both of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}