Working Stiff
Press
Niles, Michigan
25 Pages
Manufactured in
the United States
 |
| Don Winter |
Review by Dennis
Daly
I hated these
poems shortly before I liked them. They irritate. They grate. They steal your
comfort. They screw you up from toe to head with their revelations of dark
cruelty and bright cityscapes of emptiness. But pieced together like a jigsaw
puzzle you get to see the down and dirty desperateness and shellacked heroism
of an Urban Everyman’s life—maybe your own.
Cold Fact, the
first poem in this collection, confronts you with the callousness of unfettered
capitalism. The poet fearlessly states his case,
you can find in
evil good
if you are good
enough.
But where’s the
good in
“Ideally you’d
have every factory
you own on a
barge, tow it to where
labor costs were
the lowest.”? Still,
small towns
withhold
their terminal
truth, too afraid
or indolent or
drugged to ask
who is fucking
them,
I mean really…
The poem
continues with a litany of families broken apart and individuals gone bad due
to government supported decisions of greed glutted corporate bureaucrats. I know something about this subject and I have
seen those families in real time. I saw a work force of 16,000 decimated to less
than 3000 employees with little transitional training of any value. Their jobs moved to other countries on that
“barge” Winter mentions. The human beings themselves seemed to just vaporize.
In the poem
entitled Strip Bar: Hamtramck the poet details the initial excitement of moving
into the environs of a strip joint with the dancing, the dangling money, the
upturned faces, and the “goddamn of music” and bare skin. The denouement of
this piece offers the other lonely side of the tale. Winter says,
When she finally
got to me
I stuck a dollar
bill
where my eyes had
been.
Her face had the
alert sleepiness
of a cat’s. She
smiled
vacantly, moved
on to the next dollar.
I drifted into
the night air.
The lights on my
rig pushed
the dark aside,
moved me
towards the
house, towards
no one waiting.
Sometimes the
title of a poem summons a back story, which infuses the piece with extraordinary
significance and meaning. My Grandfather was a Matewan Miner is one of those
poems. Winter sets up the poem as a photograph: a bunch of coal miners posing
for the camera. As they stiffly hold their breaths for the shutter we can see
that they are dying from inside out. This was about the time of the so-called
Matewan massacre in West Virginia—the back story. When the United Mine Workers
tried to unionize these same workers, the miners were evicted from their
company housing. The local sheriff Sid Hatfield with the town’s mayor and well-armed
citizenry in tow faced off against the Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency (a
private army of company- hired gunmen). A shootout ensued and eleven people
died including seven detectives and the mayor. Detectives later murdered the
sheriff. Federal and state troops were called in to stop the violence and the
union’s organizing. Here’s part of the poem,
Coal’s turned
their faces
into dim candles.
Their teeth gone at 30.
With each cough
they still mine
the coal in the
dark
of their lungs.
They stare down
the future.
Dust will frame
their dreams.
Nice touch at the
end. Dust to dust—coal dust, that is.
The poem
Visitation in which the poet’s persona laments his inability to visit his child
hangs like a pall above this book. His sadness seems to etch itself into these
pages. He says,
All night I keep
arriving
in someone else’s
childhood.
And once a year
you send
a postcard of his
happiness.
The poem As Time
Goes By meditates on the innocence of the past and the reality that dreams once
proffered. Winter shows us an aging piece of Americana, the drive-in theater on
Route US 31. Then mulls over its memories and meanings. Winter describes a
moment of innocence,
… kids from days
of tight pants
& tight dreams, we stretched out
under the night
sky,
looked for a sign
from the stars
like a cosmic
lottery.
Of course the
title of the poem was the song of innocence banned in Rick’s bar in the movie
Casablanca. In fact the song highlighted the cynical son-of-a-bitch that the
Bogart character had seemingly become. The poet leads us in the same direction.
Describing the present realty of truckers the poet continues,
men slump alone
in rigs &
deeply smoke. Big assed, barrel-chested
cowboys who eat
double-fisted, steer
with their knees…
But like in
Casablanca memory has its moment of triumph. Winter says it this way,
…a few remain,
hang on
memory, like
those unknown connections
we used to credit
to the stars…
The title poem
Even the Dead are Growing Old tells a horrible tale of competition with a
woman’s dead boyfriend, a boyfriend she loved beyond all logic. The poet mulls
over his problem,
…I can see
by her eyes she
won’t let him go.
I don’t tell her
I knew the guy.
I worked misery
whips in Washington
with him on the
other end.
Woman he was
screwing then
used Maybelline
greens, foundation, grape lipstick—
nothing hid the
welts, things he’d done to her.
Once she wrote
FUCK YOU in empty beer cans
Across the lawn.
Then he flicked his knife
Like a match
before her eyes.
Okay, so these
things need to be told. It pisses me off but I get it. I’m not sure I like Don Winter’s
persona. Hell, I’m not sure I even like Don Winter. But damn this poet can write. He’s a natural
and I’m envious.
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