In Marc Sheehan's poem, "Field Guide to the Native Emotions of Michigan," he references Michigan's mitten shape, and describes its upper peninsula as "a useless appendage, a cartoon superhero's power ray unable even to stun Wisconsin." Then he admits, apparently with no small sense of mixed chagrin and wonder, that he's lived in Michigan his whole life, following that with an italicized "Man Lives Entire Life in Michigan."

I haven't lived my entire life in Michigan, but I grew up here and came back forty years later to retire. So when Sheehan's poems speak of Lansing, Grand Rapids, and Grand Haven I know those places. And I certainly know Walhalla, a nearly empty crossroads on US-10 just west of Chase. And no, there's no resemblance whatsoever to the real Valhalla, the "hall of the dead" from Norse mythology. Hell, they couldn't even get the spelling right here in west Michigan. But Sheehan gets the ambience all right, the ruined farmhouses, collapsed porches, the junked cars and abandoned gardens - all emblems of the poverty of such places as Walhalla and other near ghost towns of rural Michigan, as well as the outlying areas of larger towns recently become part of the growing industrial rust belt of the midwest. These poems brought to mind the recent award-winning story collection of Bonnie Jo Campbell, AMERICAN SALVAGE. Sheehan's settings are very near the same, simply honed and polished down to a few lines that tell the same sad stories of jobs, lives and dreams gone south.

Sheehan's Michigan roots poke through most of these poems, even when he's passing through places like Scotland, County Clare Ireland, Galveston or Nebraska, as he remembers a marriage dissolved, the death of guitar guy John Fahey, the origins of 4-H and a Catholic childhood. Love lost, religion lost, jobs lost. There is a lot of ruminating on these hard changes and losses, and yet there are also hints of fond memories for things like cutting rhubarb and eating the pie, a tractor tire swing and sitting atop his sister's horse, lifted there by his father.

There are moments here that, if you are a certain age, will cause a catch in your throat - like the piece about taking his mother out to lunch from the old folks' home and how, "in my mild-mannered way, that I brandished a napkin like a paper cape to wipe my mother's chin ..." Or when he remembers going to Grand Rapids with his mother, who "shopped for curtains at Herpelsheimer's while I watched Bond, James Bond, in Thunderball at the shabby Majestic Theater." So many, if not most, of the people and places Sheehan writes of in VENGEFUL HYMNS are vanished now, lending an overall melancholy air to these poems, even the ones that make you chuckle, remembering.

I rarely read poetry, but I liked this book. ( )