The Arrival of the Future by B. H. Fairchild
"The Arrival of the Future" by B. H. Fairchild is a collection of forty poems that vividly captures life in the Midwest and South of the United States. The poet draws upon scenes from rural settings, such as farms and small-town establishments, to evoke a sense of nostalgia and reflection. Fairchild's writing is characterized by its detailed imagery and avoidance of sentimentality, which allows the reader to engage with the stark realities of these environments. The poems reflect on themes of daily living, labor, and the interconnectedness of human existence with nature.
Structurally, Fairchild employs various poetic techniques, including enjambment and carefully arranged stanzas, to mirror the complexities of memory and meaning. His work often incorporates religious undertones, emphasizing Christian principles that shape the lives and experiences of his characters. The collection explores how faith influences their understanding of life, death, and the future, presenting a world where morality and spirituality are integral to everyday existence. Through a blend of personal history and broader cultural narratives, Fairchild’s poetry invites readers to contemplate the significance of their own experiences within the tapestry of life.
On this Page
The Arrival of the Future by B. H. Fairchild
First published: 1985
Edition used:The Arrival of the Future. Farmington, Maine: Alice James Books, 2000
Genre: Poetry
Subgenres: Lyric poetry; narrative poetry; stories
Core issues: Daily living; life; nature
Overview
In the forty poems in The Arrival of the Future, B. H. Fairchild dwells on scenes in the Midwest and South: an Oklahoma farm, a wheat field, a potato patch, a small-town cafeteria, a highway in west Texas, a grocery store, a movie house, a tavern, a barber shop, a machine shop, and a hotel. Each is evoked in such vivid, descriptive detail that one assumes the poet is recalling early boyhood experiences. Yet the portraits of those who people these locales and the scenes themselves lack sentimentality, however fondly the poet remembers, and the images have a sharpness that delivers meaning without excess emotion.
Structurally, the poems reveal considerable artistry. Fairchild employs enjambment to regulate not only the rhythms of his lines but also the meaning. Shorter lines break meaning into fragments of thought, suggesting the discontinuity of scattered remembrances, as though the material of thought is present but the connectedness of meaning is still missing, as in these lines from “The Girl in the Booth.”
new car, string of trout,
The pauses at a line’s end to suggest a thought that is modified in the next line also suggest that the poem’s persona remains uncertain of the meanings that accumulate as he remembers. This give-and-take is managed by the ebb and flow of the lines’ rhythms and lengths, and the poem concludes when meaning itself has achieved coherent shape.
Stanzaic structures are used to give a poem both symmetry and balance: three stanzas of seven lines each; three unrhymed quatrains; a single, lengthy stanza; a single stanza of short lines that looks like a linguistic totem; and a series of irregular short stanzas and lines that scatters meaning like exploded emotion. Many of the poems have stanzas of equal length and number of lines (unrhymed), suggesting that the poet’s ideas are conceived more fully before they are written or that his thoughts form a more coherent and larger whole than do the shorter, broken-up lines. Sometimes, the lines form units of thought or images that play against one another. In the following stanza from “A Cafeteria in Pasadena,” each of the four lines ends on a pause, and at the conclusion, the words seem to spiral upward.
In that stare is the word within the word,
Each line has its own subject—word, white cup, speech, song—so each length contains a part of the meaning that develops from “word” to “song.” The last line not only concludes the poem but also emphasizes the final image by its brevity.
Among Fairchild’s other poetic strengths is the ability to evoke both atmosphere and emotion in descriptive passages while subtly giving a religious context and meaning to the whole poem. His poem “Angels” seems at first to have little to do with heavenly figures. The angels appear in a vision as “four flaming angels crouched on the hood” of a tractor trailer that has crashed and put the driver in the hospital. Friends sit around the bed laughing, drinking, and singing a country song, missing the religious significance of the man’s words. As he leaves the hospital, however, the driver shouts, “Behold, I come like a thief!” (from Revelation 16:15). The moment is rife with religious overtones, suggested by the image of nurses waving good-bye to the man, their “white dresses puffed out like pigeons/ in the morning breeze.” The flaming angels have been transformed into billowing white figures.
By injecting biblical quotations and religious language into many of his poems, Fairchild conveys the sense that Christian principles play a large role in the lives of his characters, the Bible’s teachings are never far from their minds, and the Bible gives them a moral reference point and even a language. The poet is one of them, too, for in “Describing the Back of My Hand,” his drooping, curled fingers bring to his mind the image of “Adam reaching out to God.” Perhaps this point is nowhere more evident than in the book’s climactic poem, “The Arrival of the Future,” which returns to the poet’s early years in Oklahoma. An especially hot summer has made people fear that the end of the world is at hand and that “Christ would ride in on a cloud.” The poem follows the boy’s grandmother as she works in the potato patch, “Rock of Ages/running through your head,” and goes about her life, expecting the Second Coming with the full faith of a Christian soul. At the conclusion, however, the boy’s vision supervenes. Having absorbed his grandmother’s faith, he sees that death gives life, that the future has arrived, and that it “was forever now and new and holy.” The book’s final lines demonstrate the essence of Fairchild’s ability to shape his meaning into a vision that is both poetic and religious.
Christian Themes
Fairchild’s poetry describes a world that is mainly southern and rural, a world that is peopled by characters who believe in basic Christian principles and who could be characterized as God-fearing and Bible quoting. For them, Jesus is real and always close by, and the hierarchy of their thinking runs from the earth they till to the animals they tend, through their own humanity to Heaven, which overlooks their world and guides them in it, finally judging them. The lives of Fairchild’s characters are filled with labor, be it driving a semitruck or working on the farm, in a cafeteria, or in a tavern. Churchgoing is a regular activity, as are visits to the tavern. Death is viewed as the end of an earthly life and the beginning of a life hereafter.
These people expect to be judged by their actions on earth and punished for their sins, which are defined by the fundamental precepts of Christianity and which are taught in their churches. For them, sin and salvation are not questioned or analyzed. These people know what sin is and what salvation requires of them. As humans, they are tempted to sin, and they often do, but they also believe in the spirit and God’s mercy, so as they live, they hope, and as they sin, they pray for forgiveness. Their faith is more implicit than overt, despite their churchgoing ways. Their values express their beliefs, the value of daily labor and of constancy, the value of earth’s creatures in the scheme of nature, and the importance of the whole natural realm in which they live and breathe. Many of the characters are boisterous and profane, but one senses that beneath the rough exterior, they harbor and are sustained by a simple, strong faith that, in times of crises or strong emotion, rises to the surface.
Sources for Further Study
Christophersen, Bill. “The ’I’ and the Beholder: Negotiating the Shoals of Personal Narrative.” Poetry 182, no.1 (April, 2003): 35. A number of well-illustrated insights into the nature of Fairchild’s poetry are linked to the early collections, beginning with The Arrival of the Future.
Hentoff, Nat. “A Poet with the Pulse of Jazz.” The Wall Street Journal, August 19, 2004, p. D8. A profile of Fairchild that deals with one of his poetry collections and the poet’s relationship with jazz.
Mason, David. “Seven Poets.” The Hudson Review 57, no. 2 (Summer, 2004): 325-335. Contains discussion of Fairchild and his poetry, which the author feels deserves more attention.
Phillips, Robert. “Lines Brief and Bountiful.” Review of The Arrival of the Future. Hudson Review (Spring, 2001): 169-175. Fairchild’s first collection is given a brief appreciative review that is set amid a survey of several other poetry books, with some comparison among them.