Rowing Inland, Jim Daniels's fifteenth book of poetry is a time
machine that takes the reader back to the Metro Detroit of his youth and
then accelerates toward the future. With humor and empathy, the author
looks at his own family's challenges and those of the surrounding
community where the legacy handed down from generation to generation is
one of survival. The economic hits that this community has to endure
create both an uncertainty about its future and a determined tenacity.
Divided into four sections, Rowing Inland calls out key moments from
the author's life. The events that inspire many of these poems took
place a long time ago and often it has taken the poet his entire life to
write about those experiences and write about them with the necessary
emotional distance. For example, some of the poems in the section Late
Invocation for Magic reference the first girl he ever kissed and her
accidental death by fire. In the last section of the book, Daniels
approaches the current political and social standings in Detroit with
lines like, The distance to Baghdad or Kandahar / is measured in rowboat
coffins / while here in the fatty palm of The Mitten / minor skirmishes
electrify tedium. Although it focuses on Detroit's metropolitan area,
the book can be considered a snapshot of working-class life anywhere
across the country. Daniels casts his lens on a way of life that is
often distorted or ignored by the powers that be. He zooms in on street
level where all the houses may look alike but each holds its own secrets
and dreams.
To paraphrase novelist and screenwriter Richard Price, Detroit is the
zip code for [Daniels's] heart-a place that his writing will always
come back to. Readers of contemporary poetry with a regional persuasion
will enjoy this collection.
