Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
Trash Truck 7:38 A.M.
(And Other Love Poems)
By Ed McManis
Finishing Line Press
October 2025, 40 pages, ISBN-13: 979-8899902314, US$17.99
There aren’t many love poetry books written to celebrate the mundane. In his new chapbook, Ed McManis writes a series of odes to mature, long-lasting love, exploring the nature of ongoing compromise, of the joy of co-existing with difference and dissent, of lost dreams and the ongoing anxieties of parenting, aging, and loss. These “silky, intricate/love letters” are written in short tercets and look at a partner in the context of the everyday with its ongoing grudges held, the intrusive sound of garbage trucks, slicing carrots for dinner, counselling sessions, missed holidays, man caves, garden pests, and weight gain. These may seem unflattering and generally speaking they are, but thesewould be the very things – the ordinary detail that makes up a shared life – we would miss most in absentia. There is a deep and relaxed intimacy here where the quickening of the heart is not about desire but about care:
sleeping face, lips
blue-hued, sheen
of night cream, chestserene, and I panic, reach
until I see movement
behind her eyelids, (“Vigil”)
The book is bookended by birds, ravens and hawks, the former in particular exhibiting human characteristics that mirror the sometimes rough edges of relationships. After so many years together a couple will often inhabit the world in ways that are quite different, each drawing on their own histories and perspectives. McManis plays with this notion against the backdrop of these birds while also nodding to the way in which these differences can co-exist even with the grudges:
“Apparently crows hold grudges,” she says,
reaching into the saltine box.
“Probably ravens, too.”We’ve been married forty years.
“No doubt,” I say, ruffling my feathers.
“Maybe add another cracker.” (“COVID: Week Four: Ravens”)
In spite of the familiarity (and the minor contempt it might breed), there is always something kept back, a mystery intact, a distinctive and unique piece of individuality or what McManis calls “a spider”:
We learned each
of us has a spider
we keephidden, maybe
in a fruit jar,
or as a bracelet;call it a hobby,
a vice, nail
it on a cross. (“The Tarantula Counseling Sessions”)
Although the poems are reflective and often sharply honest, there is also wry humour scattered throughout the book. One example of this is in the love poem that reflects on a marriage – perhaps for an anniversary, and the nature of aging together:
Her last
love note,
unsigned.I reinforce
the eyelets
on our 40thAnniversary banner;
she dusts all
the guests (“I Do” I Said”)
Trash Truck 7:38 A.M. is not your typical book of love poems. These are poems that are a homage to the kind of love that endures – love that is pigheaded, that is rooted in shared experiences including negative ones, and above all, love that is earthy. Trash Truck 7:38 A.M. is a homage to the earthy wisdom of a partner who recommends that the writer look outside the window to the the earth:
And I stare past
the stories into
the earth, mute foreignerin this garden of
possibility, a stranger
to all these kindred roots. (“Writer”)