The Norsk Nightingale; Being the Lyrics of a "lumberyack

The Norsk Nightingale captures the rough music of northern Wisconsin logging camps in the early 1900s. Kirk wrote in the Scandinavian-inflected dialect spoken by lumberjacks, a tongue of many syllables, broad vowels, and irrepressible wordplay. These are poems about men who felled giant pines by day and made their own entertainment by night: songs for sweethearts left behind, tall tales of supernatural encounters, comic riffs on the absurdity of camp food and the bosses. Characters like Yim, Tillie Olson, and Olaf feel like people you'd actually meet in a bunkhouse, their speech rendered with affection rather than mockery. The collection also includes translations of classic poetry rendered in the same dialect, which is either a charming experiment or magnificent cheek, depending on your perspective. What endures is Kirk's obvious love for a vanishing world, the logging camps, the immigrant communities, the particular beauty of work so dangerous it made poets of the men who did it.