Dogged and Flawed: On Garrett Stack’s “Yeoman's Work”

Garrett Stack | Yeoman’s Work | Bottom Dog Press | 2020 | 90 Pages

Garrett Stack’s debut collection of poetry, Yeoman’s Work, paints the world of the working-class using all the hues of a blue-collar pallet. If you’ve ever used Go Jo in a futile attempt to scour lithium grease from the channels of your flesh or felt the sting of steel-toed boots through worn socks in winter—if you’ve ever blown your nose inside the bottom hem of your work shirt, no time for a break—then you will find Yeoman’s Work familiar territory.  

Yeoman’s Work is divided into three parts (Kitchen, Field, River) with a standalone poem, “Diurnal,” opening the collection. “Diurnal” introduces the reader to a husband and wife preparing for their daughter’s wedding. As if suturing a wound, Stack deftly threads the backstory of the couple’s aged yet stolid love as they’re about to usher their daughter into their very own lifestyle, one where, for the man, “three boats and no motors / oil slick rainbow steel toes [and] a knack / for calibrating torque wrenches / . . . are often enough” while the woman “hopes the honeymoon / bears no fruit.” The placement of “Diurnal” suggests lineage plays a vital role in the working-class world of Yeoman’s Work. The origin of every person in the collection could easily have come from this proverbial Adam and Eve.

Kitchen opens with a speaker, nostalgic for times in life they can never have back, a life with bonfires and friends “grown fat . . . waiting for their war” friends that, in reality, “[got] out,” through their military service, “the sandbox . . . their only option,” friends who come home draped in “medals and metal . . . or maybe just the flag” and whose “first thought” when waking to the sounds of children playing is “where’s my gun” and the “Second thought is Jesus.” Accompanying these juxtapositions of nostalgia and reality are the women with “their own hard sadnesses, / their empty bedrooms already full / of their own ghosts” or a security guard who spends her birthday working at an art museum, where she has no real authority and knows truths of artistic displays she will never share. There is even an instance of the apocalypse, where the poets, “teachers / and Doers and DREAMERS” are “mostly dead,” an apocalyptic world where the speaker implores readers to “First imagine the huddling silence. / Now think how loud the birds will be.” Rounding out Kitchen is a poem with all the subtlety and truth of working-class, midwestern poetry. In “Selecting a Reader,” the poem’s speaker imagines the kind of reader who might come across their work, and it turns out to be a “morning-ugly” laborer “stumbling haphazardly” upon the speaker’s book of poems. The man, not interested in reading the poems, places the collection on a stack of textbooks belonging to his daughter. The poem ends with the father noting “For this kind of money, I could get / my tractor fixed” to which the speaker notes “But he won’t.” The Midwest I was born and raised in, the Midwest I live in, is populated by these very kinds of fathers—hard-scrambled, dogged and flawed, and who sometimes only know how to demonstrate their beauty and worth through shard-glass displays of self-sacrifice, quite easy to miss if not looking closely. 

Death and its everlasting wake blossoms in section two, Field. The title poem “Yeoman’s Work,” opens in what appears to be an inherited home walloped by a deluge so staggering “it’s easy to believe it’s raining / everywhere on Earth.” In the house, a speaker prepares for the labors of the day, their leg “stiff” though the “fence needs mending / before the late sun breaks.” Though the speaker’s thoughts are to “blame your father / for the hand-me-down / labor and inherited cold” or sounds of their mother’s voice, encouraging them to “lay it all down,” we get the sense the speaker will power through their hard life ahead, a life “inherited” from a father and mother no longer present. Death also abounds in “Spring Harana,” where a “young girl / in a new black dress . . . moves like a brook trout / in the stained light / of the rectory basement” and the narrator yearns for a funeral, a reason to dress up and “catch up / with old neighbors” instead of “starting the snow/blower,” and again in “The gravediggers listen to Mellencamp while they work,” a poem with a speaker who notes “It could be beautiful / to lay down on the new grass” to “apply for asylum / as refugees here among the resting.” Through a patchwork of subtle yet effective allusions, Stack reminds readers that “Grief / is an old flavor, but always / smells new.”

Though it’s a stretch to say there are moments of optimism in Field (or the collection in general), there are poems that hint at small hopes. In “Spalted maple,” the narrator’s father retrieves a plank of the unique wood so that his son might build a box as a bridal gift. Spalted maple, with its weakness to fungal infection and early rot, is useless for building unless seized at the right time, dried and tenderly cared for. But it’s here, in the early stages of rot intercepted with care, that the wood is at its most durable and beautiful, perfect for building a “tabernacle for ticket stubs, receipts, the litter / of treasured memories.” There is also a sliver of hope—or, perhaps, acceptance—in “At the Supercuts the lonely men,” where men who do not talk about their feelings and who are rarely touched find “Therapy at $14.99 a pop,” with more still in “Concerning grace,” where two stones, side by side, support a house for which the “untold years / wrap as heavily / as . . . a simple set / of golden bands.”

In River, the final section of the book, these themes barrel on without losing steam. Military service and its effects on those close to those who serve is front and center in “A Thanksgiving Letter for a Friend Stationed in Iraq” and again in “Before he deploys.” Likewise, the death or miscarriage of a child, furtively suggested in prior sections, is confirmed in “When the bedroom fell.” There is also no shortage of genuine representation of candid rural America, demonstrated, par excellence, in “The Raquette River Club” and “At the Friday skate.” But the deftest of Stack’s poems in this section (and one might argue throughout the collection entire) have nothing to do with ruralism. They have to do with the nuanced difficulties of long-term, romantic relationships. One cannot write about these relationships with such candor and do so free of vulnerability and self-sacrifice, for the observations detailed in Yeoman’s Work are beyond the reach of those who have never had a partner to thank for half of the adult they’ve become. Love, throughout the collection and especially in River, is not puppy love. It is not enticing, alluring, or sexy. But it encapsulates the harsh tenderness of caring for another after years of developing together. This harsh tenderness’s apex lies in the juxtaposition of three poems. First, “When the bedroom fell,” which uses the bedroom of a couple who have suffered a miscarriage as a metaphor for the struggles a relationship endures after such a loss. In it, the speaker states, “If a room / falls in a neighborhood / it doesn’t make a sound / but folks will still swing by / for the yard sale.”  Later, in “Before we arrive at the party,” we encounter Georgia, who, before attending a party, instructs her partner, the speaker, “instead of saying something / weird, you can just talk about sports,” a request the speaker struggles to honor but manages. Despite the acerbic tone, this speaker, having been successful by the end, notes, “Georgia hangs from my arm and the way she leans into my wind / and the only thing I want to say is I know, We’re a helluva team.” And finally, the speaker in “On Thursday Night at Dominic’s” reveals a touching and vital moment of surrender in the name of love, stating, “I finally let myself go”—finally let themselves love another. The result is a venture in time travel, where the speaker says, “I can see you / as you will be, more beautiful but greyed, so that when you take the podium / they’ll no longer think of sex.” Though it might have taken the encouragement of “enough wine” to propel the speaker to say these things about their partner, ultimately it was this letting go that in the very moment of the poem itself puts the speaker in the future: “in that someday / auditorium, just another face watching you / work, remembering you as you were that night.”

In Yeoman’s Work, Stack writes with a regional precision so pronounced, so of the marrow of the Midwest, I wonder if someone not from the region would miss just how nuanced it really is. Coupled with that regionalism is a narrative of love nurtured by a sensitivity that knows true cruelty, hardship, and loss. Though this is Stack’s first, the breadth and depth of the collection, as well as the talent of the poet behind its production, couldn’t be clearer or more promising.