The Art of the Lathe
B.H. Fairchild
1997 Beatrice Hawley Award
1998 National Book Award Finalist
1999 William Carlos Williams Award
1999 PEN Center West Poetry Award
1999 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
1999 California Book Award
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.
"The Art of the Lathe by B.H. Fairchild has become a contemporary classic—a passionate example of the plain style, so finely crafted and perfectly pitched….workhorse narratives suffused with tenderness and elegiac music…"
—Los Angeles Times
"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."
—from the introduction by Anthony Hecht
"These remarkably textured, generous, haunting poems articulate the absence and
longing that are created by experience and that in turn keep experience alive. Anyone who
wishes to understand not only the contemporary American idiom but the reasons for that
idiom will have to read B.H. Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe."
—Wyatt Prunty
about the author
B.H. Fairchild was
born in Houston, Texas and grew up there and in small towns in west Texas, Oklahoma, and
Kansas. He attended the University of Kansas and University of Tulsa and now lives with
his wife and daughter in Claremont, California. His awards include the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize, a NEA Fellowship
in Poetry, a California Arts Grant, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship to the Sewanee Writers
Conference, a National Writers’ Union First Prize, and an AWP Anniversary Award. His
poetry collections include Local Knowledge, The System of Which the Body
Is One Part, and Flight. He is also the author of Such Holy Song, a
study of William Blake. His poems have appeared in Southern Review, Poetry, Triquarterly,
Hudson Review, Salmagundi, Sewanee Review and other journals.
Author photo by Joanna Elderidge Morrissey
two poems from the art of the lathe
