Poems for this Life
by Samuel Hazo
I've admired the work of Jim Daniels since his first book (Places/Everyone)
appeared in 1985. My admiration increased with each successive book: Punching
Out and M-80, plus a chapbook entitled Niagara Falls. Now we have Blessing
the House, in which his talent remains as strong and defiant as ever. Let
me add up front that I admire Daniels himself-his quiet steadiness, his
almost Lincolnesque mix of candor and good humor, his tragic sense. All
this makes him a very good poet now, with the potential of becoming a truly
exceptional poet in time to come.
Some might say that Daniels' basic subject matter (working people) makes
him a blue-collar poet in the best sense. After all, he comes out of a
working man's Detroit-the tough union workers of Chrysler and GM, the Tigers
in the summer and the hard winters, lunch pails, timeclocks and racial
problems. The fact that he now teaches in Pittsburgh (at Carnegie Mellon
University) is a perfect transition since both Pittsburgh and Detroit are
proletarian cities; the phonies don't come, and they don't last if they
do come. But Daniels is more than a poet of place, although DetroitûPittsburgh
is the perfect mix for him, a graduate of the traditional parish schools
that have given him a core that is changeless:
I stopped saying prayers at night
but kept on with my speech drills,
kneeling, folded over the side of my bed-
prayers for this life, with their
clear consequence.
He keeps on resurrecting his boyhood and adolescence like old scrapbook
photographs in poems like "Faith," "Polish American Night, Tiger
Stadium" and "God's Stopwatch." The latter concludes:
Sister Agatha told us kissing
passionately for more than five seconds
was a sin. At lunch that day,
Patty and I headed straight to the closet
and started counting.
What appeals to me most in these new poems is how Daniels experiences the
world he moves in and through. He feels it with his entire self. If I can
offer one suggestion for a poet of his talent and range, I would suggest
that he follow the spirit of the third section of this book in which the
poems arise from travel. This removes him from his basic city-subjects,
to be sure, but the change is absolutely healthy. Daniels' sensibility
is not intimidated but enriched by a train ride in Italy or a visit to
an acquisitive and inquisitive semi-relation in Yugoslavia to whom he has
brought a blouse "from America":
Why is it I expect the poor
not to be selfish?
I'm sorry for the face I made.
It's an injustice to quote so little of this poem; it's called "Silk,"
and it's a masterpiece. I praise it and its sister poems for their maturity-poems
of a grown man with a spiritual core. Daniels has moral concerns that bind
him to the things and people of this world, and they begin with his own
family-his love for his father and mother, his wife and his children. I
still recall a landmark of a poem from his previous book, M-80; it was
called "Anthem," and it was about attending a football game with his father:
I shiver in the rain
as my father sings me
what now I hear as
a children's song. I lean on him,
the umbrella and rain my excuse,
my shoulder against his,
and I imagine my mother
falling in love.
There is a tenderness in these lines that is inimitable, and it is not
limited to his parents alone. Here are just two lines to his wife from
"A Day of Sainthood"-"Sometimes I think calmness is love./Peace, the small
caress and no words." Appropriately the book ends with a family poem, which
balances the title poem that introduces and sets the tone for the entire
book. Daniels here speaks as a son who is now a father himself and, as
a son-father, prays for the people who made him (and now his growing family)
possible. The concluding lines define the book as the book defines the
man:
In this grey cloudy town,
sometimes I address a Lord
who may as well be the sun
and today, I give praise
for his warmth:
Lord, shine down on those
who brought me to this world,
pull us through another day.
Poet and novelist Samuel Hazo was named the first State Poet of Pennsylvania
in 1993. A professor at Duquesne University, he has been director of the
International Poetry Forum since 1966.