The Secret Life of Railroaders, and: The Men There Were Then (review)

121 reviews manuscript. What's Happening, being largely descriptive, is best read as the setting for or general context of Immigrants. In these moving collections, written under the trying circumstances of the "dead man's zone," Baca's humanity shines through. Evident is the honesty and energy reminiscent of the early Kerouac and Ginsberg. Certainly Baca would be hurt by being labelled a "prison poet" and limiting his efforts to that subject area. Moreover, it is unlikely that his present output, by which I mean the two books here under review, should be seen as a logical end point. His is a poetry of the richness and wonder of Ufe, of the mystery of human relations, of the unannounced kind word. I, for one, look forward to Jimmy Baca's future travels. ROGER GAESS Jim McLean. 7"Ae Secret Ltfe of Railroaders. Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan: Coteau Books, 1982. 63 pp. $5 (paper). Howard White. The Men There Were Then. Vancouver, British Columbia: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1983. 95 pp. $6.95 (paper). Margaret Atwood's recent New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, Uke John Newlove's 1977 Canadian Poetry: The Modern Era, offers a picture of a national Uterature with an enormous hole in it. Anthologies like these present a literary portrait of a Canada in which nobody works. Yet contemporary Canadian poetry is rich in new writing which details from the inside how Canada is experienced by that overwhelming majority of us who are employed for a Uving. Two recent first poetry collections are superb examples of the high quality of that Canadian writing which concerns itself with the daily Ufe of most Canadians. Jim McLean's The Secret Life ofRailroaders presents poems from the Ufe of a railway carman. McLean apprenticed in this trade after high school, and still works in Moose Jaw for the CPR. With faultless poetic skill, McLean uses his fine insider's eye for detail to offer a spectrum of responses to the railroading Ufe: from anecdotes about feUow employees to appreciations of the events and visual aspects of his job to an account ofthedepths ofesoteric knowledge everyone acquires at a skilled trade. Among the more memorable of McLean's portraits of those who work beside him is "the apprentice from Winnipeg" who can't stand KUk, the luncheon meat his boarding house landlady packs for him each day. This apprentice is too shy to complain, except to those who work with him. And with the rough humor characteristic of many jobs, these men manage to hide in the apprentice's emptied lunch pail each afternoon a note home for the landlady: more klik! love that klik! Also here is the man singing rock and roU to himself under the noise of a machine which cleans oil-soaked lubricating waste: secure beside the hammering machine he belts out entire scores doing all the parts himself instrumental sections too uses whatever's handy tongue teeth fingers even eyeüds remembering a loose puUey belt keeping perfect time to Peggy Sue 122 the minnesota review The way a job completely dominates some people's off-work Ufe is documented by McLean in his poem "summer vacation." He describes a railroader en route to Disneyland on holidays who passes some rail yards and pointed out to his wife freight cars stencilled with the yellow dot explained they had been examined for 70-ton Southern wheels 8.14 per Rule 80 job code 4628 In "watching wheels," the "I" of the poem is at work on a rainy night while a crane is lifting derailed rolUng stock back onto the tracks. His particular task is to stretch out on the roadbed watching for a crack of light between the rail and the crane's back wheel not that it isn't important if the crane tips over well all be down the road those of us who are still alive Yet the poet is aware that such close observation, so necessary to an insider, appears rather bizarre to anyone passing by. And indeed, out of the darkness arrives the voice of the perennial bystander who shows up at every accident and disaster. The poem's protagonist comments: Christ, it...