The Art of the Lathe

Timothy Steele
"B.H. Fairchild brings sympathetic insight to the people the machinists, welders, and farmers he writes of. And like a fine novelist, he has a gift for focusing on those moments when lives constrained by psychological or economic circumstances are touched by beauty and significance."


R.S. Gwynn
". . . James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus spoke of forging the conscience of his race in the smithy of his soul; in the dusty light of a Kansas machine shop, B.H. Fairchild has performed similar magic.


from the introduction by Anthony Hecht
"With elegance and restrained subtlety, Mr. Fairchild interweaves topics that become something like musical themes, including the central theme of machine work . . .Anyone who can lay claim to the authorship of this much excellent poetry wins my unqualified and grateful admiration."


Book Description
B.H. Fairchild's The Art of the Lathe is a collection of poems covering a wide range of subjects, though it centers on the working-class world of the midwest, the isolations of small-town life, and the possibilities and occasions of beauty and grace among the machine shops and oil fields of rural Kansas.


From the Back Cover
"Fairchild boldly plunders the territories of prose to expand the possibilities of contemporary verse. He undertakes to translate the various and splendid particularities of the novel, the memoir, and the travelogue and heighten them into the lyric mode. These fluent poems are omnivorously intelligent. The reader never knows what will come next; but, as deeply psychological in their probings as a novel, they always cohere." (Dana Gioia)


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Anyone who can lay claim to the authorship of this much excellent poetry wins my unqualified and grateful admiration. — Anthony Hecht


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