Today I managed to read another book of poetry in which faith plays a central role! I’m really onto something this year, guys! (I mean, considering that I hover somewhere between agnostic and atheist and am an okay Quaker and kinda a cultural Catholic and all. In any case, Jesse Bertron’s A Plumber’s Guide to Light, the 2021 Rattle Chapbook Prize winner, is a delicate blend of humor, homage, and family portrait, exploring Bertron’s life as an apprentice plumber (who happens to be a poet) and the guys with whom he works, as well as his own family’s tangled and complicated stories.
When I say that A Plumber’s Guide to Light is funny, I mean that it made me laugh out loud, more than once. Sometimes it’s laugh-out-loud funny in poems that also pay homage to the guys from whom Bertron is learning his trade—because, let’s face it, they’re all guys. (I assume even Texas has some women in the trades, but they sure aren’t represented here.) There is really nothing funny in “Dust,” as Bertron explores his mother’s gradually disappearing memory alongside his own life. “Working Late,” on the other hand, feels propulsive: we can see the guys Bertron describes at jobsites, from the five brothers who go help each other if one has to work late to, at the end of the day, the fires set by the even-later-crews:
Jacob used to say it was for warmth, / when we’d work late and see the framers’ fires. / But when you’re cold a fire holds you close. // The framers are much looser with their fires, / hanging around, kicking a beer can back and forth / in the very edge of the light, as if the fire’s gravity / was something they had chosen and could leave.
In many ways, as Bertron weaves together family and parents in declining health with the different supervising personalities of the guys for whom he works, and the different types of jobsites they work, he is telling the story of work in America. We aren’t all working physical jobs, and God knows I’m grateful that, unlike those gables in “Standing Up Gables with Conner Finn,” I don’t have to manhandle eight-hundred-pound rods of iron, but all of us are, in our assorted ways, trying to make our peace with work, to find the ways we can make it work for us. Maybe some of us find work close to godliness, but I’ll bet a hell of a lot of us are more like Jacob, who bolts at the end of every day.
That melding of humor (even hilarity: see “Cave Paintings in the Port-O-Can” for that) and emotion makes A Plumber’s Guide to Light a fascinating, moving read.
Also, I can’t tell you how grateful I am that women’s bathroom graffiti tends more toward the uplifting than the thousand-dick-varieties of which Bertron writes.
Essentially a Nerd 