Rick Campbells journey from the banks of the Ohio to the beaches of Florida is a rhapsody, and the music he makes in ordering his world takes us with him, to the headwaters of a new river. 'Rick Campbells poems leave some sweet dirt under your fingernails proof of hard, honest work when the longing of small-town America is not enough. ""Setting the World in Order"" eloquently plots our geographically impossible trajectories. On the way, Campbell can lay down a narrative as spacious as the range of a blues harmonica, every gritty riff dissolving into compassion' - Dionisio D. Martnez. 'Rick Campbells poems move with grace and muscle and music from the Catholic working class of his youth, its factories and foundries, along the rivers of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida, and through the lives of the flesh-and-blood characters of contemporary America. Part prayer, part song, part gritty story, they always dance with meaning and significance; they always wholly embrace the idea of individual presence in a terrible, beautiful world' - Frank X. Gaspar From ""Harmonica Lesson"". Go with the rhythm till you cant get off the track. Like this. Tight-belly staccato, hands cutting and freeing the air, one hard-held bottom line. Play between trains. Keep the wheels in mind. Catch the next one and play all night. In the morning try the whistle. Youve earned it. It should sound like Kansas. ""Setting the World in Order"" is the tenth winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry, selected by Robert Fink of Hardin-Simmons University, editor of the ""Walt McDonald First-Book Series"".
Legend The Poem in the River Ohio River Sunday Gasoline The Wall Late November, the Coming of Winter at State Street Elementary School Creeley Cursing in Church The Spring in Tevebaugh Hollow Caterpillars The Candles at Margaret Mary Catholic Church How the Streets in Front of Kaufmann's Department Store Tell Me I Am Home Setting Pins, 1966 The History of Steel Morrison's, 1968 Hanging Tobacco Seed Harvest, Gilroy, California For the Old Men at the Grindstone Factory Body Song, Vietnam Harmonica Lesson Well Done Discourse Seashell Salesman Meditation on Today's Limit of Pleasure Pensacola Street Sunrise Letter to Kathy from a Frigate at Sea To Jennifer, Thinking of Li Po The Geography of Desire Leaving Home, Pittsburgh 1966 Juno Beach and the Sea Turtle Horseshoe Crabs Mating at Carrabelle Beach Orange Nights, Cold Stars Fishing the Encampment The Breathers, St. Mark's Lighthouse Confluence Even the Ohio Can Change Setting the World in Order Bamboo A Walk in the Woods On Missing the First Step on the Moon Angels Flying You Home The Drowned Son On the Water of My Mistakes Proving Lake Okeechobee Trying to Get Pregnant, Flying to Iowa Long Distance Call 3/1995 A Thousand Miles from Della Rose
