EDITORS' CHOICE

David Tucker. Late for Work. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006.

Tucker’s first full-length volume of poetry, Late for Work, winner of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize and chosen by Philip Levine, is both the rare book from outside the Academy and an accomplished collection that will appeal to the critic as well as to the more casual reader. It’s both grounded and radiant. A tricky combination for any writer.

A native of Tennessee and now an assistant managing editor at the Newark Star-Ledger, Tucker manages wonderfully one of the most difficult jobs a poet can do: he addresses his audience in clear, accessible language, actually says something both interesting and meaningful, and maintains the kind of delicious mystery that keeps us going back to a poem for more. His skill at compressing and organizing his material makes these poems both sing and resonate; his taut lines, along with his ability to capture and alternate both urgency and laziness, to embody the fleetingness and funniness of human experience, speak brilliantly of both delightful and contrary human impulses. They make what is often numbingly ordinary worth pondering. Tucker is a master of plainspeak, yes, but not dullspeak or downspeak by any means.

His is a quiet, inclusive humor, as in “Columbus Discovers Linden, Tennessee,” when Christopher Columbus claims, for his Queen,

. . . these ragged bean farmers climbing
out of scorched fields, their mules bellowing
at the red sunset. And this odor
of soup made from grease and bone . . .

along with

[t]he OxyContin zombies, meth heads, and gun toters
gathering around the fire barrels, these too, these too.

These too? Absolutely. Everybody’s in this book: secretaries, dancers, the meth-heads and farmers, lovers, auctioneers, detectives, janitors, executives, whippoorwills, as well as crows and cows, dinosaurs and dogs, blackbirds, sparrows, and Woody Woodpecker—all of them getting down to the work of living.

The temptation with a book this bright and memorable, of course, is to want to quote the whole thing because, like any good poem, nothing tells it better than itself. And what could seem more antithetical to a poem than a newspaper article? I don’t know. And I don’t know how Tucker, in his own life and writing, makes the risky leap from one to the other—but oh, boy, he does make the leap. This from “City Editor Looking for News”:

What did Nick the Crumb say before he died? What noise
did his fist make when he begged Little Pete
not to whack him with a power saw? Did it go thub like a biscuit
against a wall or sklack like a seashell cracking open?
Did he say his mother’s name?

“[T]hub like a biscuit against a wall”? “[S]klack like a seashell cracking open?” Death, biscuits, Nick the Crumb, and the sea? It’s marvelous. How does he do that? Through precision. Through the familiar. Through humor and 20/20 observation. And imagination. He is as precise in his silences as he is in his diction: the interplay of his punctuations and line breaks in this poem orchestrate the staccato realities of the newsroom and the erratic manifestations of both the men and women who make the news and of those who write it.

And then there are his paeans to laziness, like this one from “Putting Everything Off”:

. . . May we always
have mountains of things that have to be fixed, acres
of the unfinished. Let us hear as long as we can

the kitchen faucet that drips all day with its one
inscrutable syllable . . .
. . . while the moon glowers down
and the stacks of things not done grow beautifully deep.

That divine, inscrutable syllable.

Tucker offers no fancy orations or vatic prognostications, no abstract conundrums, no linguistic pyrotechnics, no what-can-he-possibly-be-talking-about moments, just unadorned diction, transparent syntax, and a solid and vibrant rootedness in the world of the actual. He gives us the unmistakable, indisputable, extraordinary world. And “beautifully deep” it is too: Late for Work shines the way the sun shines when we rise and go to the work of our own lives: luminous, enlightening, and necessary.