Robert Milo Baldwin

2560 Danbury Lane

Highlands Ranch, CO 80126

Phone: 303-470-1514

E-mail: robertmilobaldwin@hotmail.com

 

 

 

LUDLOW

 

by

 

David Mason

 

Red Hen Press

Los Angeles, California

 

Paper and cloth, 231 pages

ISBN-10: 1-59509-083-2 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-1-59709-083-4 (paper)

ISBN-10: 1-59709-084-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-1-59709-084-1 (cloth)

 

 

What used to be called an epic poem is now a novel-in-verse. What used to be difficult and obtuse, and purposely so as in Pound s Cantos, is now concise and clear, at least as practiced by David Mason poet, essayist, Fullbright Fellow, and longtime resident of southern Colorado where his family has lived for at least four generations. In Ludlow, a story which percolated within him for years, he has ambitiously given us an epic that tells a tale in plain language we can understand. Written largely in stanzas of eight lines, with lines generally of ten syllables, and blank verse to avoid the sing-song of end-rhyme, Ludlow tugs us through the struggle of the Colorado coal miners strike in 1913-14, resulting in a massacre of miners, their wives, and children most of whom died in earthen pits beneath the wooden floors of their tents that soldiers torched.

What the miners wanted was not much the right to collectively bargain as a union, an eight-hour work day instead of twelve, pay for dead work (shoring up the mine with timbers to keep it from collapsing), honesty in weighing the tonnage they dug, and the ability to buy goods from stores other than those owned by the company. To get these meager gains, they walked off the job and camped outside during the fall, winter, and spring of 1913-14. When sporadic violence escalated between the striking miners and company guards, the governor sent in the National Guard, which quickly became the arm of the company.

What Mason does best with this story is weave together historical details, actual historical figures, and the characters of his imagination characters you root for. As created by Mason, there s Luisa, daughter of a Mexican mother who died young and a Welsh immigrant miner aptly named Mole, killed by an accidental explosion set off by the candle on his helmet. And there are the other miners, such as Too Tall McIntosh, Lefty Calabrini, and Cash Jackson, most of them immigrants, trying to chase the American dream down in dark holes in the ground where, in the short span of four years, explosions killed 272 miners due to the dangerous mine gas unique to the Rocky Mountains.

There are also historical figures, such as Mother Jones, held against her will in the Trinidad hospital while wives and daughters of the miners march on the hospital to demand her release, only to have the National Guard shamelessly charge them with their cavalry. And Louis Tikas, a Greek immigrant who rose in the union ranks, who organized men who could not be organized, who worked to keep the peace between the miners, the company guards, and the National Guard, and was shot in the back after attending a meeting requested by the authorities, ostensibly to avoid further violence but actually a ruse to kill him.

While Mason s sympathies obviously lie with the miners and the hardships they suffered, he does not paint with a black and white brush, but in shades of gray, and he also shows, within the ranks of the union, the prejudice and racism the Americans had for many of the striking immigrants Irish, Welsh, Italian, Greek, Mexican, Japanese, and others.

This was America. America was shame,

corruption, ruthless struggle, men who only cared

for power. No cause could lift its people very long,

their flags expedient,

their faith a way of shutting other people out,

their unions nothing more than gangs collecting dues,

and over everything the hypocritical rich

collecting art and smothering the immigrants.

 

Mason s poetry in Ludlow is generally not as musical as the above passage, for it uses little internal rhyme, rarely employs rime faible or slant rhyme, and often does not adopt such simple measures such as assonance or consonance. But it is plain-spoken poetry from which you feel the coal-dust on your hands and face, the coal-dust in your lungs, the weight on your back of tonnage dug out of the mountain, the snow blowing beneath the walls of the tent in a January blizzard leaving you huddled in a blanket dusted with snow, and the gravel Tikas tasted in his mouth when he fell face-first, shot from behind.

In short, Mason s Ludlow tells a good story, one worth reading. Much of what passes for poetry today does not do this at all, much less attempt it. As he says in his afterword, maybe we are ready again for stories in verse.

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