Blessing the House

In the evolution of Jim Daniels's concerns as a poet, we see a steady movement over the last twenty years away from the struggles with the pressures of society and toward the confrontation with the difficulties of existence itself. Daniels's first two books, Places/everyone and Punching Out, illustrate the implacable reality of blue collar jobs. The gritty details of the poems are drawn primarily from a Detroit auto factory where the workers are abused by the bosses and by their fellow workers. His third book, M-80, shows the neighborhood where the autoworkers and their families live. There is no sentimentality here. The neighborhood is full of tough teenagers and wild children, and the adults are often abusive and ignorant. In the long poem Time, Temperature, the trust that the younger generation has in the wisdom of their elders is destroyed by the paranoid racism of the speaker's grandfather. This bleak view of urban life, and of Daniels's own childhood, is mitigated only by the rough love of family, but when family life goes awry, there is no balance to the harsh demands of work and the terror of violence in the streets. Dedicated to his two children, Blessing the House, Daniels's fourth book, has a softer tone. Perhaps the poet has temporarily made peace with the struggles of life, or perhaps he has simply created a safer and more loving environment for his own children than he himself had growing up.

A strong voice in contemporary poetry. Though his early works deal primarily with factory life, this latest collection deals with life as a father and observer. He captures the situations that go on around us everyday that we are usually too busy to appreciate for what they are. a brilliant collection.