Poetry written in the language of everyday people has a long and distinguished history stretching from Wordsworth through Philip Levine.

A Detroit native like Levine, Jim Daniels made a name for himself as one of our leading working-class poets, and his new collection is within that tradition. It also happens to be a lot of fun to read.

Daniels' considerable body of work includes nine books of poetry, three volumes of short fiction, two screenplays and a one-act-play which have brought him numerous awards, including being featured in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies.

	'Revolt of the crash-test dummies' By Jim Daniels Eastern Washington ($15.95)

He teaches creative writing as the Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.

"Revolt of the Crash-Test Dummies," winner of the 2006 Blue Lynx Prize from Eastern Washington University Press, begins with an engaging mix of themes, from the banality of heading to work after breakfast, to reflections on capital punishment, lost loves and suicide.

The book's second section contains the long poem "Sizing the Ring," in which a present-day speaker remembers his adolescence in Detroit. We learn of his seventh-grade crush, a 15-year-old girl named Carol, who disappears while pregnant by an unknown father. Her brother Matthew, the speaker's friend and fellow altar boy, is shot dead in his car while "looking for a prostitute/in downtown Detroit."

Daniels engagingly employs the language of this pimply, pungent world as he veers through guilt and remembered longings, toward if not understanding, then at least what peace adult resolution can give.

In the third section's series of childhood memories, we see the speaker taking out the garbage after closing at an 85-cent-an-hour job at Dairy Queen, while his manager, destined never to escape from a life of lousy jobs, riffs on an air guitar to a stereo blasting Jimi Hendrix.

In another, he's taking Outdoor Chef, a class created to give losers a chance to graduate, in which the stoners and muscle-bound meatheads learn a lot
about cooking chicken and pork. See, those are
important things. You can get sick not cooking
them long enough, and make others sick too.
Neighbors would never come over for a cookout again.
My apron had some crude joke about a hot dog on it.
So did everyone else's.

There is pain as well as humor in these poems, such as in the remembered visit to a Wonder Bread factory when a classmate, eyes closed,
.........................stroked
his cheek with a warm slice. Wouldn't it be great
to work here? he said. When we toured the Stroh's
Brewery years later, he said the same thing.
They offered no tours of auto plants,
yet that was where we ended up ...

The last section focuses on themes of raising a family in an urban landscape of drug dealers, car stereos shaking one's children awake, and neighbors fighting (Daniels lives in South Oakland).

Difficult issues of economics and race are handled with an admirable honesty and lack of self-pity and fleeting moments of parenthood are preserved with a wistful, restrained language that regularly reaches heights of bittersweet beauty.

In "Illuminating the Saints," taking apart an outgrown crib becomes an opportunity to reflect upon long-gone drunken college nights as well as a charmed few months when the speaker and his wife lived in Italy.

The kids and I collect sunshine in baskets
beneath our cracked stained-glass window.
During thunderstorms, my son tapes notes
to the glass, asking the rain to stop.
Thankfully, such everyday moments are not lost on Jim Daniels, a poet adept at folding elegant, poetic cranes from the rough newsprint of everyday life.