The Blue Buick: New and Selected Poems Paperback – January 25, 2016

Drawn and collected from poetry volumes and writings of a poet at the peak of his powers, “The Blue Buick” is one of the greatest collections by a living poet written in my lifetime. If Walt Whitman is the Jesus of American Poetry, Fairchild is the Apostle Paul, exacting and spreading the former terms into our manifest destiny—a hundred years later—as dream and nightmare alike enjoin the National Psyche. Fairchild has an unqualified hold of the “prism” in which the ordinary light of our culture shines, his tellings through a poetry equally resplendent in form and prose comprise the full American spectrum.

I count my days in poetry classes with Fairchild among my best days. Luckily for me (and others) we can still learn from him. The Blue Buick is filled with answers to my poetry questions. every one makes me ask: "How did he DO that?"I received the book and dug right in, looking with for the new poems first. I was happy to see some prose poems there. For a long time I rejected prose poetry as not a "thing," but recently have embraced that as a great vehicle (pun intended) for storytelling poems. The prose poems in this book are an answer to my old question: what makes a prose poem a poem?" I will not divulge the answer here so readers who are asking that same question can discover on their own. Let me just say, these poems and the others made me want to pick up a pen and write. The best poems always do this. If you ever end up with my copy of The Blue Buick, (I'd have to be dead of course) you would find a poem or two of mine scribbled onto one of the blank spaces in the back. I do this in books where the poems are so damned good I cannot help but write, right there!As to the collection in toto, it pleases me to find old favorites, like Brazil. I think if you had to have only one Fairchild book (why would you?) this collection has the best of his best, plus...Every poem leads the reader to something: a new awareness of something old and gone, a fresh insight into the humanity of dusty things, or a different slant on region and resourcefulness. Then there is that classic Fairchild sense of humor: dry, ironic, acerbically gentle.Get this book. Really just get it.

Best book of American poetry in 2014, and woefully absent from the National Book Award for Poetry shortlist. As a collection of "new and selected," the poems span Fairchild's 30 year career and show a writer who is not just at the top of his game right now but one who has been there all along. Energetic, sensitive, subtle, and "maximalist," to borrow one critic's word, the poems speak to us all--we see the machine shops in Kansas, the wide open plains, old books, baseball games, Edward Hopper's figures, cigarettes, cars, and people hungry with desire. And throughout, I remark at the insight, the perfect word found, and I say yes. I've bought this book for my parents and my friends. All love it. I will continue to return to it again and again.

B. H. Fairchild and Billy Collins:Poetry Returns to the Masses.Say what you will, story-telling poets have always struck a responsive and sympathetic chord to the fickled and transitory mind-set of a media-saturated society. Collins uses self-deprecating humor and universal aphorisms that seem indisputable to lure even the most anti-literary, anti-intellectual Lilliputians among us. Fairchild recounts such a detailed string of memorable events and their life-affirming implications that any of us raised in a working class world of post-war Midwest origins can only nod our heads and say, “Yes, I remember those times, those movies, those simple, yet-complex life styles under constant assault from a rapidly changing world of A Bombs, television tubes and planned obsolescence.”

This is the 2nd book of work by Fairchild that I've read recently. He is a sensitive writer and an "honest" one. He chooses his scenes and characters, carefully, and you can't help but recognize yourself, relatives, or old friends in his work.

Fairchild is America's best living poet and is in the running for best American poet ever. His new and collected is worthy of our highest literary awards. His command of language is reminiscent of Anthony Hecht. His intellect, wit, and big dose of common sense makes reading his poems a great and unforgettable pleasure.

B. H. Fairchild is the greatest voice I have found of the real midwest. This collection includes all of my favorites and some new ones too. He seems too current of a voice to be old enough for an anthology.

Fairchild is amazing.