Gathering works from five of B. H. Fairchild's previous volumes stretching over thirty years, and adding twenty-six brilliant new poems, The Blue Buick showcases the career of a poet who represents "the American voice at its best: confident and conflicted, celebratory and melancholic" (The New York Times).

Fairchild's poetry covers a wide range, both geographically and intellectually, though it finds its centre in the rural Midwest: in oilfields and dying small towns, in taverns, baseball fields, one-screen movie theatres and skies "vast, mysterious and bored." Ultimately, its cultural scope-where Mozart stands beside Patsy Cline, with Grunewald, Goedel and Rothko only a subway ride from the Hollywood films of the 1950s-transcends region and decade to explore the relationship of memory to the imagination and the mysteries of time and being. And finally there is the character of Roy Eldridge Garcia, a machinist/poet/philosopher who sees in the landscape and silence of the high plains the held breath of the earth, "as if we haven't quite begun to exist. That coming into being still going on."

About the Author
B. H. Fairchild is the author of seven volumes of poetry, including The Blue Buick and Usher. A finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Bobbitt National Prize, he lives in California.

Reviews
"I have no trouble ranking [Fairchild] with the best poets of his generation." -- Hudson Review "One of the most readable poets of our time... This is poetry of the extraordinary ordinary, nonpareil." -- Ray Olson - Booklist, starred review "Acause of celebration... Noisy, visually arresting poems, full of occult weather systems, the barbed nostalgia of a man born into one world, now inhabiting another ... [Fairchild] has spent a lifetime singing the body electric of small, dying towns, day-laborers and the beers at the end of their day, the pressure it puts on the man who must remember it all." -- John Freeman - Boston Globe


Awards
Winner of Paterson Poetry Prize 2015.



Book Information
ISBN 9780393352160
Author B. H. Fairchild
Format Paperback
Page Count 352
Imprint WW Norton & Co
Publisher WW Norton & Co
Weight(grams) 270g
Dimensions(mm) 211mm * 140mm * 25mm