Poetry of place

If we in the Coos Bay area praise Michael McGriff for his poetry, we have to admit a bias. He is writing about us. McGriff lived here, a graduate of Marshfield High School, and it shows. The poem, “Coos Bay,” is a list poem, one image after another, which may make us seem hayseeds to readers to the east of us, the rest of the United States, or make the eastern readers seem to us ignorant as they need a dictionary to know the significance of choker setters, calk boots (pronounced “cork”), burn barrels, scabs, scotch broom and other detritus of the western shore.