Steel Valley by Michael Adams

Steel Valley

By Michael Adams

Lummox Press, 2010

103 pages

$15.00 USA

www.lummoxpress.com

Reviewed by Pam Rosenblatt

Michael Adams’s Steel Valley is a 103 page book filled with poetry, prose, and letters that make you aware that there are worlds outside of Boston, Massachusetts. And Adams’s worlds, or places, are memorable and filled with Adams’s appreciation of man-made as well as nature-made environments.

Adams’s poem “The Soft Fires” brings you quickly into the first of his worlds – his life as a youngster growing up in Steel Valley, south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, amidst the steel industry’s final years. Here you find Adams mixing steel industry imagery with sexual imagery to create metaphor:

:

The Soft Fires

I stepped into the fires in the cathedral shadows of the furnaces,

in thrall to a life alloyed of iron and flesh.

It was Pittsburgh where I was tested and tempered,

Pittsburgh that entangled within me the chained indifferent fury

of industry and the unquenchable drives of the heart.

Our first time was in her second floor apartment

in South Oakland, where the city tumbles

down the bluff through blown trash

and woodland to the furnaces of Hazelwood.

The house was tumbling too, but slowly,

succumbing to gravity and the landlord’s indifference

to paint, caulk and shingles. We didn’t care, we

were young, newly free, had lightning

on our minds. The maintenance of structures or love

beneath bay windows that had resigned

the battle against wind and rain, leaving

long streaks of rust in the mustard yellow walls,

flecks of plaster on the sheets and a persistent smell of mold.

Ah, but that night –

there was a red glow

in the belly of the clouds from the furnaces, rain

hammered the windows and the October branches

of the sycamore battered the house.

I tasted the wind and rain and the sulphur grit

of the mill as I entered the fires and found her rhythm,

and we rocked together, welded by our hunger.

The storm’s thunder mixed with a deeper sound,

striking through the earth from the mill,

felt more than heard, some great machine

forming and shaping the bones of our city,

a monster hammering

deep in the soil and rock.

The night, our city

beautiful

molten

riven to the core.

Next, Adams transports you to the second place where he lived – Spruce Mountain, West Virginia in his poem “Spruce Mountain, West Virginia”:

Spruce Mountain, West Virginia

I wanted this earth to speak through me,

to tell you – he tried to make a living

of it. It’s true he failed, but there is no shame

in that. It takes more than a man and a woman,

and a small piece of land, to  build something that endures.

You saw the farms scattered on the mountain,

the small towns of the valley –

            Onega, Seneca, Circleville, Cherry Grove

They may not look like much but by God

they have staying power.  You don’t enter

a place like this lightly.  It takes generations

of blood and sweat flowing into the hardscrabble earth,

and not a little darkness.

The soil here is built of disappointment and fractured dreams.

Leave this land alone for a few years

and you may lose everything to its unassailable patience.

This thick woodland was once a meadow,

and the smell was not that of autumn leaves

and spring water, but the pungent odor of cow dung.

Here is where the house stood. You have to get down

on your hands and knees now, a beggar, dig

in the damp earth to find any trace.

Someone must have carted off

the few things I left that were worth anything

before they set the fire.  The rest is gone

to rust and the voracious creatures of the soil.

Look, there is the spring where we drew water,

next to it the big oak still stands, the one whose branches

sounded like small animals on the tin roof

when the wind blew in the autumn and the leaves were dry

but not yet fallen.

Right here was the kitchen where we would play

guitar and banjo and drink Jack Daniels straight up

until we were brave enough to venture

into the moonless November dark

to confront the mountain’s

unhouseled ghosts.

What words are fit to honor these mountains that rose

to heights unseen to this day, rose before

towering fern forests were locked in darkness

and began their ages-long decay

to the black rock we rend and gut this earth to find?

What words for these former Himalayas, softened by eons

of rain and the slow rafting of continents to today’s tree-

green hills?

            I say there is wisdom here, solace, and much of the sacred.

What do our few decades matter?

Someday our remains will be scattered in a place

not unlike this, a place of trees and sky

and rough-hewn land, a part, finally, of it all.

I wanted this earth to speak as it does,

undeniable and  unanswerable,

as the leaves, like the generations of men,

fall around us on this autumn day.

A man and woman and the great land.

Here for a season, for few turnings

of the wheel to endure, to love,

to give what we can.

Then gone.

Then Adams moves to Colorado.  And he writes a letter called “Wet Mountains      Jan 2003” to his deceased father about how he has matured, or “changed so much –”:

Wet Mountains                                  2003

Dear Dad,

Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve written. But I

woke up – it’s the middle of the night but my bladder

won’t let me get a full night’s sleep anymore – and I was

thinking about you. It’s been 20 years almost to the day

since you died, and I didn’t even think about that but I

woke up with you on my mind, so I guess it was floating

around in there

It’s 12 below zero and the wind’s blowing pretty good,

but it’s warm in the cabin with a fire going. You’d like

it here.  The stars are so close, up here at 9,000 feet. I

think you’d be proud of me, building this cabin with my

own two hands, just like you did our first house back

there on Elizabeth St.

The world’s changed so much – I’ve changed so much –

that I don’t know where to start.    First off, I married

and pretty happy — been together over ten years now!

No kids, though. I don’t know why, just one of those

things. I always had something else going on and by the

time I stopped and looked back it was just too late.

…

I’m glad for nights like this, when I wake up and can’t get

back to sleep. A near-full moon shining on the snow, the

wind in the trees. You’d like this land – a high, rolling

country of sage and pines. You talked often of Colorado,

of how you fell in love with it in your Army days.

You know, it reminds me of Homeville, and of my farm

in West Virginia. You can’t see the high mountains

from here, just rolling tree covered hills and deep

valleys. I think that’s why I chose it. Funny, isn’t it? A

guy moves halfway across the country to get away and

then picks a place that reminds him of home.

Well, dad, that’s about it for now.

Love,

Michael

            Through his free flowing, descriptive and lucid writing style, Adams wins our attention. He writes about three worlds, or places, that are not easily accessible to us Bostonians: the steel mining industry that is basically longer in existence in Pittsburgh; Spruce Mountain which is located in West Virginia and is quite a drive from Massachusetts; and Colorado which is a plane ride or a many days’ drive to get to from Boston.

It’s a pleasure to read Adams’s Steel Valley not only for its quality writing but for the different but similar perspectives on life that Michael Adams depicts.