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.

To us these images are stuff we have always taken for granted. To Michael McGriff they are memories and the meat of his poems.

McGriff has used these words and the memories within them to be the most successful and perhaps the best poet to ever come out of the Coos Bay area. I hesitate a bit on “best” because he is only 31, and he has only a slim chapbook to his published credit so far.

Even so, McGriff has won many awards for his poems from the universities of Oregon, Texas and Stanford. The names associated with his various fellowships are intimidating: the James Michener Fellowship in Creative Writing from Texas, and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford.

He also won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize last year — one of America’s most distinguished awards for a first book of poetry — for his collection “Dismantling the Hills,” to be published this year by the University of Pittsburgh Press. McGriff describes this collection as “a witness to the landscapes and industries of rural American life.”

That is his focus in “Dismantling the Hills” and “Choke,” his slim volume published by Traprock Press out of Eugene. He writes about a blue-collar Oregon lumber town, much like Coos Bay, and, as one critic said, “He uses a broad range of styles — from the strictly narrative to the expansively meditative, from the grounded to the surreal.”

Take a look at “Coos Bay” again. The list is seemingly casual, starting on U.S. Highway 101 with a sign that is no longer there. The casualness hides that McGriff is using a version of terza rima, the same stanza that Dante used in the Divine Comedy. These lines are unrhymed, and McGriff varies the line length as he alternates longer with shorter lines.

McGriff also insinuates into the list of Coos Bay images a personal note, “my father’s arm / almost around me,” and later they laugh together at the frailties of others. There is, however, a sharp note of sadness that intrudes, “the machinist neighbor / dying of cancer,” as the sunset silhouettes broken machinery on the flowing bay.

Other poems in “Choke” reflect this same dichotomy. “Coos Bay” is full of marvelous imagery, but socially it is almost derelict. “Shift Change, 9 A.M.” is familiar territory to anyone who remembers working on the green chain.

The guys are in “Little Charlie’s all night diner” after “the graveyard shift / at Georgia Pacific Veneer.” They talk about Jimi Hendrix and Little Charlie’s pies that saved one guy’s “mother from cancer.”

The poet remembers his grandmother “whose brain’s been fried / from years of benzene exposure, / she has no memory,” but the poet does, remembering for her, remembering the log trucks rattling the canister of toothpicks and the “high school kids / in rented prom outfits / holding each other under the plastic fronds / of palm trees.”

The poet looks around at the dead elk on the wall and a Chamber of Commerce brochure that says, “This Must Be Heaven.” Just for a moment the incongruity of the stylish couple and the setting allows the poet and the waitress to make contact. Just for a moment.

Yet in “Cormorants,” McGriff remembers his “old desire / to wear the house of the hermit crab.” The incoming tide covers family stresses, his mother dealing “hand after hand of blackjack for the Indian casino,” his “brothers piling up debts and overtime / in the distant sawmill.” McGriff wants to escape, and his “fears wound around one another until they formed a suspension bridge / stretching into the north spit.”

He walks that bridge and by the bonfire on Horsfall Beach “the cormorants scratched the walls / of my dream.” He says, “I want the shelter of the doorframe of a prayer. / If only / for a moment, I want to stand like the blue flame of a wave / in a set of waves.” Like many of us here in Coos Bay he finds solace in the natural beauty of the place.

McGriff has escaped from Coos Bay to Texas and Stanford, but I suspect he has taken the town with him. The cormorants measure the arc of his love, as he says, and as in an Indian story, he has been transformed into the bird. With others so transformed he has been able to “fly / with the remarkable / freight of our lives over the cliffs that surround us.”

“Choke” can be ordered from Traprock Books, published by Erik Muller, 1330 E. 25th Ave., Eugene, OR 97403.



Ralph Mohr taught English and Latin at Marshfield High School for 31 years. He welcomes comments and suggestions regarding the column at rmohr1565@charter.net.