GROUND WORK poems 2020 – 2025
by Michael Daley

Description

A mainstay of northern Cascadia poetry, Michael Daley brings us poems written in the last five years but covering a great many more. He begins with a focus on physical labor in the context of unemployment, hitchhiking and freight trains, goes on to recall events from being a worker on boats, a tree-planter, construction laborer, and finally visiting poet and teacher. The poems move toward a ‘grounding’ that perhaps comes with age, and a ground on which to stand, nodding toward, among other topics, the frustration many conservationists and anarchic environmentalist poets find themselves facing.

See the fine review at Raven Chronicles by Nina Burokas tab and also hear Michael read in his interview by David Gilmore of Sound Poetry in Tacoma.

Excerpt from the poem LONGING

We take away the ladders at sixty
said the E.R. Tech stitching my arm
after I climbed beyond the roof
where rotted rungs
left me standing on air
to plunge my seven decades
onto blades, bricks and tools
where the past stopped moving forward
to this gashed pile of unbroken bone.