The Blue-Collar Sun by Lucas Farrell

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Blue-Collar Sun by Lucas Farrell Laura C. Stevenson (bio) the blue-collar sun Lucas Farrell Green Writers Press https://www.ipgbook.com/the-blue-collar-sun-products-9781733653459.php?page_id=21 80 pages; Print, $16.95 Lucas Farrell, whose the blue-collar sun won the 2020 Sundog Poetry Book Award, is a Vermont farmer. The combination of farming, poetry, and Vermont may conjure up an image of Robert Frost, but a century clearly separates Farrell's generation from Frost's. Big Picture Farm, which Farrell owns with his wife, the artist Louisa Conrad, includes a B&B and a confectionery as well as a flock of forty goats. Farrell's poetry is similarly twenty-first century, inclined to experiments in form and structure that extend considerably beyond playing tennis without a net. Like all good poetry, however, it is based on nuanced observation of the world. The prose poem "Sugaring," for instance, begins with a wittily apt description of the conditions under which sap is collected: "The snowy fields have softened to a raw chèvre." The poetry also contain startling lines that linger long with the reader once the book is closed, for example, "The world is hard to find once you start looking for it." The book is divided into four parts. The first, "this is your animal," consists of nine short poems, mostly written since Farrell and Conrad set up their farm. The next three sections are products of the artist's residency the pair spent in Skagaströnd, Iceland, during 2009. The second part, "i approached a little farewell," is an erasure set in nonconsecutive pages of the Nobel Prize–winning [End Page 129] novel Under the Glacier (1968), by Halldór Laxness, as translated by Magnus Magnusson. In 2010, some of its poems appeared in collaboration with Conrad's art in the exhibit To the Thawing Wind at the Freies Museum in Berlin (https://emilietrice-portfolio.com/to-the-thawing-wind). The third part, "the blue-collar sun," was published as a chapbook in 2009 by Alice Blue Books. And the fourth part, "a description of the hook i am capable of," was initially published in DIAGRAM (2010) with Conrad's illustrations and photographs, some of which are beautifully reproduced here. The result is a collection of works that are, as Farrell has pointed out in a recent interview with Literary North, as different from each other as the seasons in Vermont (https://literarynorth.org/blog/2021/4/1/interview-lucas-farrell). The simile is apt, but like the order of the book's parts, it implies sequential poetic development, starting with the shorter initial pieces and progressing to the ambitious longer works. In fact, the reverse is true. The last three sections, which date back twelve years, are rhetorical experiments with the boundaries between poetry and prose; their content is much influenced by the effects of climate change just below the Arctic Circle. The influence is visually portrayed in the erasure, where instead of blacking out the text of Laxness's Under the Glacier, Farrell has had it printed in light gray, so that while still readable, it seems to be fading. Against that disappearing background, Farrell's poem, printed in black, stands out as starkly as a glacial erratic: [End Page 130] The same sense of ecological loss touches the prose poem-essay "a description of the hook I am capable of," which contains, among meditations on a fishhook stuck in Conrad's boot, a portrait of the fishing village in which she and Farrell lived during their residency, and from which they could walk along the Atlantic coast. To where a band of old warehouses was once erected to serve a particular function they no longer serve. And in that way, they are just like the hook. The short of it is that these warehouses used to process a kind of fish that is no longer fished here. And not just here, but anywhere really. The herring that used to sustain the village have been fished into extinction, "Which itself results in a superabundance of hooks." The meditation continues with thoughts on the complicated village, all of whose...