Description
A true American demotic, Bill's Boys is a difficult register, but here's a poet able to tackle it.. Not since the late, great, Thomas McGrath has a poet spoken so clearly of working class life in its own true tone, as McEwen does here in grim stories from hardworking lives, unsparing, unsentimental but shot through with love and courage -- not least the courage of unsparing truths from the dark intersections between Irish and American histories, so rarely spoken of, much less examined.
Without the whiskey he still had his spells
of standing-steady rolling when he'd grab
the earless side of his damp head and squeeze
it hard, then knuckle it. The first time I
remember it his eyes began to writhe
like molten stones. From corded neck
on down his convoluted body rolled
and plunged and pitched while standing still, his feet
clamped solid on the pitching floor. And while
I cowered behind the sofa bed I saw
my mother leap beyond the kitchen with
a wet dish rag she flailed against his head
and face until he stopped, and she had flung
herself about him like a throbbing shawl.
Author: R. F. McEwen
Publisher: Stephen F. Austin University Press
Published: 12/16/2021
Pages: 120
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.39lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.27d
ISBN13: 9781622884049
ISBN10: 1622884043
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
About the Author
Since 1962 R. F. MCEWEN has been a professional logger and tree trimmer, working trees throughout the United States as well as in, during the late 1960's, Guyana, South America. In 1972 he began teaching Middle School English in Chadron, Nebraska, and is currently a professor of English at Chadron State College.