Search results for ""author wesley mcnair""

It is commonplace that poetry is the literary form that best expresses our deepest feelings. Those who seldom read poetry regularly turn to it for weddings, funerals, and other milestones. This Take Heart anthology--the second collection from Maine Poet Laureate Wesley McNair's weekly newspaper column--is chosen from the work of poets all over Maine, representing a wide cultural view of the state.

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What is it like to live and write in Maine? Wesley McNair, Maine's premier anthologist, asked authors who are new to Maine as well as natives to answer this question. They wax lyrical on everything from encounters with neighbors and wildlife to embracing Maine's rich natural landscape, and they take a philosophical look at the state of being in Maine. Among the authors included are Carolyn Chute, Richard Ford, Bill Roorbach, Richard Russo, and Monica Wood.

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Arguably America’s most recognized poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the equivalent of a movie star in his day (1807–1882), and his epic poems, such as “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “Evangeline,” and “Song of Hiawatha” helped create the mythic vision of America that still exists today. Many of his lines and phrases such as, “Into every life a little rain must fall,” have weathered the centuries and become part of the cultural canon. Introduced by Maine poet laureate Wesley McNair, this collection of gems makes an excellent keepsake or gift.

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A New England Book Award Finalist. “There's so much life in this beautiful book that it feels like a living thing. Wesley McNair is a kind of Chekhov of American poetry.”—Ted Kooser, Pulitzer Prize winner and Poet Laureate. Wesley McNair is a poet, memorist, and storyteller. His stories are personal and yet speak to our most urgent, universal, concerns. As he writes...For we are all born into exile, saved only by the homes we dream, and the love that we may find there. Set in rural Virginia, the poet’s younger sister Aimee is adrift in a difficult marriage to Mike, a Trump-supporting, church-going, off-the-grid gun shop owner. McNair brilliantly explores his sister’s life, his own family’s past, to seek understanding. Throughout, this marvelous work, McNair attests to patience and perseverance, and an unwavering belief in compassion and reconciliation, in love’s ability to unite us, even amidst the ugly politics of our time. Dwellers in the House of the Lord is for anyone who loves poetry’s unique power, in the hands of a master, to tell stories of our lives.

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“Wesley McNair, an unassuming, avowedly regional pastoral poet from Western Maine, is writing the best poetry of his life—poetry uniquely capable of, and interested in, addressing our larger moment.”—Los Angeles Review of Books Wesley McNair’s story-like poems have long celebrated eccentrics and misfits, the hopeful and the lost, with a tenderness that transcends the everyday. This career-spanning collection brings together his very best poems from the past four decades alongside his newest poems. Since the publication of his first book in the early 1980s, Wesley McNair has earned a reputation as a poet of place, an intimate observer of the speech and character of New England. In fact, McNair’s “place” is unlimited, as he proves in the lucid, far-ranging poems of this volume. “Whole lives fill small lines,” wrote Donald Hall of McNair’s work. He is truly, as Philip Levine wrote, “One of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry.” Late Wonders: New & Selected Poems includes “The Long Dream of Home” the complete trilogy of McNair’s masterful, long narrative poems written over the last thirty years: “My Brother Running,” “Fire,” and “Dwellers in the House of the Lord.” This is a collection for anyone who believes mixing a little sorrow and little comedy makes for poetry that moves the heart.

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“Old Poets is an indispensable jewel.” —Washington Post“An astonishing array of encounters...Hall’s observations are shrewd and generous.” —Boston Globe Intimate portraits of great poets in old age, giving new insight into their work and their lives, and context to the often flawless art created by flawed human beings. The best of themselves endure, and the old poets’ existence and endurance gives readers courage to pursue their own vision. Donald Hall (Essays After Eighty and A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety) knew a great deal about work, about poetry, and about age. Each of those things come together in this unique collection. We hear about Robert Frost as Hall knew him: vain and cruel, a man possessed by guilt. But, as Hall writes, “The poet who survives is the poet to celebrate; the human being who confronts darkness and defeats it is the one to admire. For all his vanity, Robert Frost is admirable: He looked into his desert places, confronted his desire to enter the oblivion of the snowy woods, and drove on.”Hall’s essays are once both intimate portraits and learned treatises. He takes us on a pub crawl through the Welsh countryside with the word-mad Dylan Thomas; to the Faber & Faber office of T. S. Eliot, who had discovered more happiness in age than in youth; to a reading where Robert Frost’s public persona hid the truth; to Brooklyn for lunch with the enigmatic Marianne Moore; and to Italy and for a visit with the notorious Ezra Pound. By the time Hall met them, each poet was, he observed, “old enough to have detached from ongoing poetry, to feel alien to the ambitions of the grandchildren.”Also included are portraits of the poets who taught Hall as a writer: the unfailingly kind Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters, from whom he learned the most about poetry. Along the way are observations about many other poets and the literary cultures that sustained them.Contents include: “Vanity, Fame, Love, and Robert Frost,” “Dylan Thomas and Public Suicide,” “Notes on T. S. Eliot,” “Rocks and Whirlpools: Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters,” “Marianne Moore: Valiant and Alien,” and “Fragments of Ezra Pound.”For lovers of literature, this is a gorgeous remembrance and likely to compel an immediate visit to the poetry section of the nearest bookstore—as Hall writes, “Their presences have been emblems in my life, and I remember these poets as if I kept them carved in stone.”

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