Jim Daniels's rapidly expanding list of credits may well point to a burgeoning collective taste for rapidly moving, plain, and direct poetry such as his, a poetry remarkably clear of the usual tricks of poets. His device may be said to be a lack of device; his voice apes the voicelessness of his beneficiaries, those of the American urban working class, from which Daniels sprang and with whom he aligns himself. Daniels makes his allegiances clear, as he told the interviewer for Contemporary Authors in 1987:

Though I am currently teaching, much of my poetry focuses on the factory life in my native Detroit. My grandfather, brothers, and I have all worked in the auto industry, and that background seeps into nearly all my poems.

I feel that there is little poetry being written about the world that I come from and the people that I care about. I...