Jim Daniels’s poetry of the Detroit working class of the 1980s is of direct experience growing up here in the Motor City, where the auto once reigned supreme and now working men and women continue the gestures of manufacturing, reflecting little on why. We leave it to the distancing of the poet’s eye to see more clearly.

And Daniels, for all his nostalgia and homespun Americanism which hover about his verse like flies, offers us stark images of the people he knows:

Stark and straight verse, and we do not wonder why one stanza later he steals one of the welds. This is not the slum-Detroit image that has so long plagued the city’s national image, not the mayoral corruption that seems its tradition. It’s the people working, anyway, working despite it, working because what other choice is there? Even while much of their work is abandonment:

One character, who is called Digger, appears in a short series of poems, representative of the mass class of blue collar around him: the peculiarities of pride, the simmering of angers, the resignation to the responsibility:

Here is the subject so little revealed but so often dismissed, belittled, or manipulated by money: their ends already written: