The North End Poems
by Michael Knox
Toronto: ECW Press, 2008, ISBN 978-1-55022-817-5, 125 pp., $16.95 paper.

This is Michael Knox's second book in as many years. It treats the reader to a book-length trip through the lives of two generations of what we used to call, without sarcasm, the working class in Hamilton, Ontario. That the poems demonstrate more concern for the relationships of the individuals than their workplace is a sign of the times. One of the younger men welds, but what he welds we never find out. Some others might be dockworkers. One of the wives works as a waitress in a coffee shop. "Work's a tapeworm" (37), exclaims one character, obviously in judgement.

We find out early on that the weekend spent in a drunken haze at the local stop'n'sock is more important than what happens in the daylight hours. Into this foreground peddles Nick Macfarlane on his bicycle, tempering the overarching depression, with hope, change, some other way. It is an easy guess that he falls in love, with a girl from the country who is attending the urban university. It may be an old story, but Knox tells it like a master. He describes the older men in these words: "Ungrammatical and obscene// they know they are anecdotes to the university students/ new every other summer . . ." (13), and they "joke most readily about what makes them most afraid:/ cancer, retirement, gay sons, women." All the while the younger guys are "pretending the orbits of hips [of the strippers] don't depress us" (15). Or they spout this shred of philosophy after a drunken punch-up: "but you've learned that/ there is life in this/ much as anything else// a rapture in wrath/ in this reptilian life" (18). Paint the overall colour of this picture black.

But Knox knows this is fertile ground to carry his narrative. He weaves redemptive moments into the characters' individual stories, or if they are not exactly redemptive, they provide enough substance for them to pick themselves up and dust off their backsides, and come out gunning for more. In an exceptionally fine poem, Nick and his best friend are out in the backyard in the sun. K is giving Nick a haircut, described in phrases like "bowed head," "callused hand on Nick's neck/ steadying him," and ends as Nick "runs the tracks home," "breeze blowing stubble," "in the wash of the setting sun" (24). The poem relates a meaningful, attentive, holy and wholly sensual ritual.

Nick is the guy who pulls on the gloves to go a few rounds with Lincoln, an older, experienced boxer, who'll knock him senseless at will. Nick is the kind of guy who will recall while watching his dinner spin in the microwave what his lover's friend told him about waiting. "Waiting is what will steal your life/ and it's logically a state of dissatisfaction" (104). Each character has a particular voice. Listen to Lincoln's:

People come in here and pretend it's pride and glory.
Pride and glory are luxuries.
Only rich people believe in that shit. (54)

Then there are Jen and Ronnie, who have one child between them, and a life together that "cost each other so much, all we share now is our vital hate" (84).

The North End Poems is powerful, heady, alert, no-surrender writing. Knox inhabits the stratosphere with this book. He makes it sound easy and flawless. He sings expansively about narrow lives, and lovingly about connections, and about failures to connect. He is the man to bring this slice of urban life alive, and I suspect he will be heard from for a long time into the future.

Andrew Vaisius is a writer and childcare worker living in Morden, Manitoba.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.

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