Dismantling the Hills
Michael McGriff
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008

I grew up with the smell of work. Sometimes that smell was hot metal from the powder metal factories where my father and my brothers were employed. Sometimes it was the paper mill drifting down the river on foggy mornings. Most of the time, however, it was the lumbermill two blocks from my home. I can honestly say that the smell of burning wood and sawdust wafting into my memories is the first reason I fell in love with the poems found in Michael McGriff’s Dismantling the Hills, winner of the 2007 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for a first full-length collection of poems. In a world of wood dust and debris, McGriff finds both loss and hope in the towns of the Pacific Northwest.

Many contemporary poets divide their books into sections, but McGriff resists this trend, and after reading the whole book, it’s easy to see why. Every poem is carefully crafted from the Pacific Northwest landscape, almost as if the poet himself is whittling stories and characters from wood. There is no need for sections offering different explorations of one specific theme. Every piece is a rustic work of art, and from the very first poem, it’s apparent why the poet knows his craft so well. In “Iron,” we see a narrator who struggles to leave a place that simply won’t let him go:

My blood fills with so much iron I’m pulled

to a place in the hard earth where the wind

grinds over the ridge bearing the wheels of tanker trucks

oiling the access roads, where deer ruin the last of the plums,

where the sloughs shrink back to their deepest channels,

and I can turn away from nothing.

As readers, we should be glad that this narrator only made it “as far as the county line,” for it is through this careful eye that we see not just the physical world of the Pacific Northwest, but its people. Yes, there are dust roads, lumber piles, mill ponds, but beyond the physical landscape are the people who live and work in this world.

Some poems are stories of families. In “Seasons Between Night and Day,” we see the narrator’s family in the moments of his father’s last day at work:

My mother sleeps. Somewhere between her and the stars,

my father and hundreds of other men

punch out of Georgia Pacific’s sawmill forever,

the forklifts behind them at half-mast,

other machines chained to barges

with Japanese names

before the workers file from the alien yard.

And then, lines later, this same young boy watches his father in the bathroom shaving: “this morning I enter the kingdom / of my father’s hands as they scrape away / one face for another.”

Other poems show people dealing with transitions in their lives. In “Entering the Kingdom” a blind woman with eyes “the milk of blue granite” sits in her living room thinking of a visit earlier from a lawyer “who came with a letter / from the city, a letter / condemning her three and a half acres / for the new pipeline.” In “My Uncle Would Visit,” a relative “who never left / Oregon or the town limit” visits his family from the state hospital, and tells stories of “the skies / of Kansas City / how they would fill / with carrier pigeons.” At first glance, it would be rather easy to put the characters found in McGriff’s collection into two categories: those who long to stay in a world where there seems to be little help, and those who long to be someone else, but are trapped.

But McGriff is doing more than merely recording stories of others. Each poem incorporates a narrator who not only details this world, but adds insight. For instance, in “The Last Temptation of Christ” we hear a voice that proclaims, “I read the Bible literally,” and then, a few lines later, rhetorically asks, “Why wouldn’t I?” before explaining his beliefs:

I’ve watched my father
rip lumber with a Skilsaw straight

as a table saw with a fence. Every winter
watched men put in weeks of double shifts
at the mill. My mother working until

her wrists had to be cut open, the tendons
rewired.

McGriff, with his attention to a struggling world, reminds me of contemporary poets Sherry Fairchok, whose Palace of Ashes looks at the Anthracite region of Eastern Pennsylvania, and Paula Bohince, whose Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods follows the ghosts of a rural Pennsylvania farm. (Yes, these two choices are a bit biased – I’m from Pennsylvania myself.) His harsh world is not without hope. With every poem, he reaches beyond a seemingly ruined landscape to find beauty and solace. Certainly this is a collection where the reader will understand the comfort of home in any kind of world. As for McGriff’s world, if you do not shake the sawdust from your hands when you are through with his collection, you have not read hard enough.