Blue-Collar Poet Pays Tribute to Steel Era

As a former resident of Pittsburgh – the setting for the poems in this collection – I found Last Heat by Peter Blair to be somewhat of a “you can go home again” collection for me. Blair writes from the honest and provoking point of view of a man who has worked in Pittsburgh’s steel mills, seen their decline, and who has been personally affected by the blue-collar towns that died as the mills closed down.

Last Heat was the winner of the 1999 Word Works Washington Prize, an annual poetry book competition that awards $1,500 and publication to a living poet. And it’s easy to see why Blair’s book was selected for publication.

Blair’s poems are sensitive and emotional – an engaging contrast to the furnaces and mill-hunks that pepper his poems. For example, Blair captures the all-too-human side of a co-worker, nicknamed Smoke, in these lines from the poem “Smoke”:

…His words drift down
from somewhere a tap explosion has scattered them
years ago. His chest heaves slowly,
an old furnace, a molten story. How many blacks
do you see on the river, even today?
I was their sport, see? That was the Forties.
All I remember is fighting. When the foreman calls us
for the next cast, the light in his eyes
vanishes, nothing there now but gray smoke.

Many of Blair’s poems capture the intricate bonds between foremen and crew, between co-workers, juxtaposed with poems showing bonds between fathers and sons and brothers. These are true “manly-men”, putting up brave fronts, hiding any emotion. But while Blair depicts the outer fronts of his co-workers, you hear his own voice telling you what is inside his head, the emotions he feels seem to speak for the men who won’t speak the emotions themselves. One fine example of this is “What It Takes”:

But tonight in Pittsburgh,
this old man hobbles on the bridge
toward the rusted streetcar cab
nailed to the outside wall of Chiodo’s Bar
like a steel mask…

The day has forgotten Graz,
old Pittsburgh, and Big Steel,
but night might remember,
so I lean over the bridge rail
above the silent Slab and Palte Division
and ask my brother’s face:
Do I have what it takes?…

Blair’s words are quite close to being love poems to an era that will never return to Pittsburgh – the steel era. His fond recollections of the furnaces and coal cars, the smokestacks and rivers, show a melancholy for a time that was rough, but important to not only his own history, but the history of the families of the “thousands of men and women who worked at Homestead Steel” that he acknowledges at the front of his book.

Go To Page: 1 2