Hired Hands

Michael Williamson was Reference Librarian at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa.

Hired Hands is a series of interconnected poems, both blank verse and prose poems, about a farmer named Tom who grew up and lived in Leamington, Ontario. There was a stage production of poems and Hired Hand songs entitled Tom. One hopes that the stage production had distinctly more lightness than this collection because a drearier, less cathartic sequence of poems would be hard to find and this makes for tough going through eighty-eight pages. Tom, the central character, seems to have had one hell of a life: his father was a miserable old stern bastard who took great pleasure in hanging his son upside down inside a well, “like Mussolini,” for peeing his bed at age ten, then his dog was killed, his one true love rejected him, he worked hard, told good stories, smoked fat old smelly cigars, and had a lot of unresolved anger right up until he died:

The sombreness is enhanced further by the anvil-heavy metaphors scattered throughout: “His hair/like an ash tray was dumped on his head,” “Clouds sag like an old woman’s tits.” After ploughing through this book a number of times, it is difficult to comprehend why it was published: Tom is not even an anti-hero or particularly tragic figure, he just seems unbalanced and pathetic. The poetry itself relies on a meandering narrative line which is difficult to follow. The illustrations are as uninspiring as the text.