Michael Daley, GROUND WORK
GROUND WORK: POEMS 2020-2025, Michael Daley, Ravenna Press 2025
It’s my pleasure today to share a poem from Michael Daley’s newest book, Ground Work. My full review appears in
the current print edition of Rain Taxi, and you can learn more about Michael by visiting his page at Empty Bowl, or Poets & Writers. (My on-line search for sites to share with you yielded numerous Michael Daley interviews, poems, and recordings.)
I love this poem (below) because I, of late, have been in danger of being buried in the bottom of a toolbox. House projects began piling up in December—new gutters turned into a new roof, delayed and expanded by the discovery of rotted roof struts; new flooring because of the damaged carpets revealed a leak in the kitchen, a subfloor that had to be replaced, then the perhaps stupid choice to go for a whole new kitchen; and did I mention the doors, the windows?—suffice to say we are not yet at the end. (Though now when things come up I am learning to say, “That’s a 2027 problem.”)
Rereading Michael’s poems about work, and about failed work, gives me heart.
On the Gift of Yet Another Torn Cardboard Box of the Late Great Master Poet’s Letters
For Fred Manvellor
Maybe fifty years from now, some kid mechanic
desperate to locate a caulking gun or jigsaw blade
inside a greased box labeled “finest bourbons”—
under a cache of stripped screws, bent brads,
cigarette butts, garage soot, crumpled bloodied toilet tissue—
might uncover such a trove of my own unread sketches, unsent letters,
drafts of failed poems, and dreams—if I’m lucky.—Michael Daley, Ground Work
Nina Burokas, in her Raven Chronicles review, calls the poems of Ground Work, “incantatory,” and adds a timely reminder (for me) that all work (house repairs as well as the writing or poetry reviews) is prayer.
Michael Daley is truly a northwest treasure and I invite you to take a deeper look.
