Hamilton is fast becoming a burgeoning home for poetics: Adam Getty’s poem named after the city (from his newest book Repose) efficiently wraps structure and repetition together to depict a space drained of nature, replaced by concrete and populated by wife beaters:

I step through each sullen street,
between the factories quiet:
and emptied. & places once green,
past faces whose colour has fled. (Adam Getty, “Hamilton”)

Likewise, The North End poems situates itself in Hamilton’s grungy corners, reveling in the raw physicality of the city – Knox creates a place filled with heavy lifting and brute strength, repetitive factory movements and constant muscle-muscle contact. Unlike Getty, Knox is savvy enough to ground his landscape in believable and, more than anything else, likable characters – this attention to the inhabitants of the city keep the text from drifting into the rough-and-tumble clichés Knox’s first book Play out the Match often fell into. This may be the most interesting thing about The North End Poems: it is striving for a sort of journalism, realism, that doesn’t occupy lyric poems that often. There are no metaphysical reflections or ruminations on the towering factories or high school hookers, but rather a string of harsh dialog focused into a gritty long poem.

and emptied. & places once green,

The romantic notion is to take the city and create it as its own entity, a character to itself – Robert Fitterman’s Metropolis books do this very well, allowing New York to rise out of the lines in a unique and powerful voice, a voice that utters in vocabulary of storm grates and street traffic. However, Hamilton is not New York and Knox does well not to dwell too much on the cityscape; alternatively, the characters within the long poem act as reflections of the city, soaking up the grim like dirty mops. It is then these characters that explain and shape the city. Whereas Metropolis is “maximal,” The North End Poems are focused, minimal in explaining the city through its inhabitants. In the first stanza of “Saturday Night Again” the reader sees this clearly through the protagonist Nick Mcfarlane:

Weaving home with the tracks
dawn meek in the chameleon sky
growing from the horizon of his shoulders
Nick sits drunk between the rails
Looking way down into their oblivion.

The characters are placed directly within the landscape and so they live, without acknowledging the surroundings, unaware, so that horizons and railroad tracks become extensions of legs and fingers. The city becomes an appendage of each character’s body; the buildings, the bars and warehouses of The North End Poems, are as defined by the four walls as they are by the people filling bar stools and brawling in the parking lots.

past faces whose colour has fled

Some readers will be put off by the overt “toughness” of each character; there is a lot of preening in the work, and a few tough-guy clichés. But if the poems were simply a tough-guy manual they could be dismissed. Instead Knox creates a thread of hope throughout the book. The easy thing to do would have been to list the ills of the city and let the characters wallow in that depression and redundancy. But the hope is found in small things: Nick’s relationship with Carla, a few rounds in the boxing ring, an extra visit with the kids on the weekend. It is these tiny glimpses that creates more of the realism than any of the junk-talking dialog Lincoln, a fellow boxer in the book, spouts – the reader can see the tiny triumphs, or, at the very least, struggles and can relate those battles.

between the factories quiet

While the writing is a tad ragged, sometimes drifting into easy descriptions and predictable scenes (see: “Walking the Tracks Home” and “Routine,” for example), there is a fearlessness that is refreshing. For example, Knox is willing to use dialog in a very visceral mode. The speeches by Lincoln show the intensity of the speech in the book:

Feel ‘em thwacks, them shudders
I’m pumping into your headgear?
I’m teasing your shit, letcha know
I’m the one doing the fucking winning.

The danger of such speech is to come off as cliché but the poems do well to balance these spats of dialog with description of character and scene, making these outbursts feel at home, realistic. There is a stretching for metaphors here though that can sometimes be distracting and forced but the straightforward description of scene and character are what propels the work and what the reader will find most gratifying.

I step through each sullen street

The North End Poems lives in the darker corners of the lyrical work, the sights just off the side of the pastoral work – there is landscape here and heroic characters but neither are particularly clean. The dangers of the “tough-guy” clichéd poems are avoided here and instead the reader is treated to a compelling narrative, a long poem, that shows glimpses of happiness and hope between the ragged shots it throws.