Night Moves in Ohio by William Heath

When William Heath began writing poetry in the 1960s, James Wright hailed him as “one of the most brilliantly accomplished and gifted young poets to appear in the United States in quite some time.”  Now after an award-winning career as a novelist, historian, and literary critic, he has returned to his first love.  Night Moves in Ohio vividly captures his memories of growing up in Poland, Ohio, a suburb of mobbed-up Youngstown, the city at the heart of the thriving Steel Valley but notorious as Little Chicago for its numerous gang-land bombings (“Youngstown tune-ups”).  Heath’s poems, by turns raunchy and poignant, evoke via his unblinking eye, irony asides, and acute ear for the American idiom, the dangers and delights of a by-gone era.   The rousing first poem in William Heath’s bildungsroman in poetry dealing with childhood and youth in steel country Ohio seems to channel Joe Magarac, Carl Sandburg, and James Wright, but the voice is intimately his own. These narratives are by turns poignant, funny and starkly realistic in every poem. They are the human stories of the mid-twentieth century industrial mid-west, one hundred years after Ohio was the Old Northwest frontier, and the honest sentiments in these poems remind us how a centrality of setting, as much time as place, form our experiences into themes.  Every poem is engrossing, teeming with fascinating storyline detail and imagery.

–William Hathaway, author of Dawn Chorus, New and Selected Poems

In this remarkable collection, William Heath mourns and celebrates an almost vanished way of life: sometimes brutal, yet (in his sharply focused, minutely particular, unsentimental, often humorous verses) intensely human.  At home with this world, his poetic voice (clean, dependable, sturdy as a well-made country fence or kitchen chair) brings every detail, every bristling-with-memory corner of it, alive with immediacy and sympathetic intimacy. Despite the hard-scrabble toughness of the world he evokes, the sheer exuberance of the poems (precision of line, muscular argument, concrete vitality of language) carries the reader into a strange world that in Heath’s treatment becomes familiar and understandable, not mundane but poetic: The screeching, clanging industrial din/ had a percussive rhythm.  A world that, tough as it is, is consistently shot through with its own wry, mordant humor.  These poems are savvy and lively, as exact as a high jumper’s focus, quick and accurate as a tennis player’s eye, wrist, ankle.  Night Moves in Ohio is Heath’s own remembrance of things past—an autobiography in rapt miniature of his unforgotten early life, mercilessly but compassionately lit by the laser-light of memory.

–Eamon Grennan, author of Out of Sight: New & Selected Poems