Mary Ann Mayer

Telephone Man Mary Ann Mayer

This fresh collection of plain-spoken poems captures the day-to-day life of a Rhode Island telephone man spanning forty years following World War II. In these poems, the telling is fast and no line sleeps. The voice is easy and rugged, empathic and wise-guy. All are distilled from true situations as told to the author by Bob Maitland, telephone man. Telephone Man brings the reader into the world of a specialized trade that combines demanding physical labor with the exacting art of repairing broken connections - while perched on the top of telephone poles and crouched in cellar crawl-spaces. But above all, Telephone Man is a human story. It shows us a distinctive temperament, which embraces quirky, even dangerous encounters. It shows us how keen an observer of human behavior the tradesman is, and how this becomes an essential tool in the toolkit. Set down as poems, this collection celebrates the lyric of the trade, its practitioner, and reveals the bounty of humor and humanity in the daily grind.