Call It a Day

Martin Singleton was a poet living in Toronto.

Call It a Day is McNamara’s eleventh book of poetry, and it is superb. Books written around a central theme are frequently flawed by stronger poems carrying lesser ones: the whole collection suffers. This is not the case with the present volume of work poetry, however; there is quite simply not a bad poem in it. True, a few (“The Fireman,” “At the Break”) satisfy as sketches, but nearly everything else carries a hard-edged realism that builds through careful, sensual details and very skilful line-breaks. Eschewing punctuation and capitalization for immediacy, the poet makes us feel the essential inhumanity of factory life, while empathizing with those who must sustain it. The greatest defence against this Moloch is the surrender to natural, not manmade, rhythms: “the car is going past /tired and resolute /it is gentle in the /dark going.”

The book flows naturally from “Early Morning” to “Late Night,” and two long poems — ”Punching In” (in six parts) and “in the Plant” (in ten) — are pivotal, the latter providing a grim portrait of a factory worker from inception to fatherhood. Indeed love, whether generational, sexual, of nature, or of machine, is an important theme here. McNamara does in poetry what Springsteen and Bob Seger in songs, and Dreiser, Dos Passos, and Henry Roth in prose have done for the workingman — celebration without sentimentality. Call it a Day is technically superb and emotionally powerful: definitely required reading for anyone who works, enjoys good literature, or feels.