“Still Out of Place”

Christy Passion

Bamboo Ridge Press, $18

There aren’t a lot of blue-collar poets, which adds to the many pleasures of “Still Out of Place,” a raw, lyrical debut collection about real Hawaii lives from Christy Passion, an award-winning, working-class writer in the tradition of the late Philip Levine.

Levine’s defining topic was his roots in industrial Detroit, where he worked in auto factories from the age of 14, putting himself through college. From there he moved westward, to Iowa and California, his words opening up to the fields and forests of a new world.

Passion writes about her hometown, Honolulu, where she still lives and works as a critical-care nurse. Her poems are written in different voices and personas, including several in her father’s point of view that round out the complex character to whom the book is dedicated. Like Levine, she mixes hard knocks and derelict urban vistas with pastoral visions.

In “Fatherly Advice,” the narrator tells his daughter to be tough: “There are no spring days here. Night shifts, steel-toed boots, and gin / can comfort you … ”

Anybody from a family that fished will recognize the child’s thrill at Kaya’s store and glassy-eyed fish-head bait in “Crabbing at the Old Train Tracks.” After noting the sound of her dad urinating by the side of the car and the sight of blond tresses in her sister’s Teen Beat magazine, Passion takes a thematic leap: “We are not beautiful Hawaiians here.”

Male macho is viewed ironically in “Education,” a story told by Pops, who was a teen when “Uncle’s boys” taught a lesson to a visiting Ivy League professor who came on to Auntie Clara when she was a young waitress.

The uncle tells Pops: “People, no matta how rich, or how smart, is just animals. When it’s easy to take, dey keep taking.” The uncle advises, “You draw a line around yourself and your family.”

A taking happens at Sand Island, nevertheless, in a wrenching prelude poem that recalls the bags at the feet of an uncle and auntie after their eviction from the tin-roofed house where the ohana used to gather. In the book’s last poem, “Sand Island Revisited,” Passion confronts loss and finds beauty, laughter and resolution.

This disciplined yet sensual collection, which avoids slack confessionals and lets us see, hear, smell, touch and judge for ourselves, will reward revisiting. Readers won’t soon forget Pops fussing over a sick child in the night or his daughter mourning his death and the departure of her lover. Although Passion, her father’s daughter, doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve, the reader knows she’ll come out all right.