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“Though the 50 poems of Montana-based farrier and poet Craig center around landscape and farm work, they consistently confound and disrupt expectations of pastoral poetry, veering wildly from romanticized notions of farm life toward threatening, obsessive, and even bizarrely surreal narratives. There are gay donkeys, a fierce boxing match between hawk and rabbit and constant judgments from opinionated horses. Craig's speaker is conscious of the artifice of the poems, offering trickery and confusion, and sometimes indifference. In one poem, a man holding a shotgun over the speaker complains, ‘You poets are always sad./That's about all you can do is be sad.’ At times, Craig rejects his audience completely: ‘I will pull the blinds/on you, reader. Good bye.’ Each poem is stacked with absurd reverie, cinematic observations and hilarious, winking descriptions, à la James Tate. They are also willfully uninterested in profounder implications: ‘people eating/ popcorn resemble/ praying mantises/period.’ At the book's heart, however, is a moving admission of the true power reading literature can invoke: ‘It's like I'm standing in a crowded/ public place, having my clothes/ removed briskly by a single flick/ of a powerful finger,/ over and over again.’"—Fata Morgana, Publisher's Weekly
In his second book, Michael Earl Craig blurs the line between the documentary and imaginative impulses. The resulting poems mutilate pastoral myths—a man who has ignored horses his whole life but now wants to try touching one, or two gay donkeys and their uneventful lives on the high plains—but also pay tribute to the current-day West in which this author lives and writes.
These poems sketch a slightly dented mental landscape touched by odd details and sharp mood swings, not to mention Junior Mints, Sonny Bono, and the new Pope in Prada sandals. They are superficially light and often comical, and objects frequently take center stage—a new and revered anvil, a black derby “soft as a colt’s nose,” a series of meticulously described wristwatches—but a social commentary unfurls. Characters in these poems bottom out now and again, dreaming of new or lost worlds, going off on rants or into deep sleeps, wanting desperately “to tell a story with the authority of mallets” but settling for “feeling like a turd washed up on the shore of a quiet lake.”
From the Book:
Because of Roy
Roy could move a lot of sheep.
He moved them off the mountain
with his arms outstretched
at forty degree angles.
Roy never spoke.
He wore Navy Blue corduroys.
This annoyed some of the guys.
He walked like a foster child
stepping carefully
and sometimes robotically.
The sheep respect this.
They kept their mouths shut
for once, and flowed down, down,
in a tight and docile band
over the uneven terrain,
because of Roy.
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MICHAEL EARL CRAIG is the author of Can You Relax in My House (2002, Fence Books). He was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio and educated at the Universities of Montana and Massachusetts. He currently lives near Livingston, Montana where he works as a farrier.
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