Wesley McNair

Wesley McNair is a New England poet, a New Hampshire resident until he took a professorship at the University of Maine at Farmington forty years ago (they live in Mercer, ME roughly halfway between Bangor and the NH line, going east to west) He has written roughly twenty books and has been nominated and awarded much over the last 40 years.
Late Wonders: New and Selected Poems begins with a very nice "retrospection" written by McNair, and the volume ends with a section of his new poems. Between the two are selections from his collections, including "McNair’s masterful trilogy of three long narrative poems written over the course of thirty years." (these have been published in separate volumes.

I like McNair’s poetry for many reasons. It’s down-to-earth, intimate, ordinary, sometimes funny or sentimental, always empathetic. He’s captured so much of northern New England, and yet we easily find in his lines the universal.

OLD CADILLACS

Who would have guessed they would end this way,
rubbing shoulders with old Scouts and pickups
at the laundromat, smoothing out frost heaves

all the way home? Once cherished for their style,
they are now valued for use, their back seats
full of kids, dogs steaming their windows; yet this

is the life they have wanted all along, to let go
of their flawless paint jobs and carry cargoes
of laundry and cheap groceries down no-name roads,

wearing bumper stickers that promise Christ
until they can travel no more and take their places
in backyards. far from the heated garages

of the rich who rejected them, among old trees
and appliances and chicken wire, where the poor
keep each one, dreaming, perhaps, of a Cadillac

with parts so perfect it might lift past sixty
as if not touching the earth at all, as if to pass
through the eye of a needle and roll into heaven.

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You can read more of McNair's work here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wesley-mcnair… (més)

In McNair’s latest, he offers us a narrative poem that tells the intimate story of his often troubled and struggling sister Aimee, living in Virginia with a difficult husband; but also reaches further into his family in New England, the inner dynamics and history, before bringing us into the present. I wasn’t sure I’d like this long, narrative poem; a poem that seems to inhabit some nuanced interstitial space between what we commonly think of as poetry and a longer prose piece of personal content. Not my usual thing, but I like McNair’s other stuff, and once I stepped into it and let it’s current move me forward, I was hooked.

This is McNair’s attempt to understand his clearly much-loved but troubled sister and her Trump-loving husband. The sister seems lost much of the time, searching for something she lost or never had, and we see the roots of her need in early family dynamics and history. We learn about her husband, a Polish immigrant as a child (or perhaps born here; it’s not entirely clear) and Navy veteran. McNair moves back and forth in time effortlessly and the loose rhythm draws us along. For me, I found the intimacy of his search for understanding and the pervading compassion in it, well, both moving and addictive. In the end the poet and the poem offers us hope; hope which we badly need in these trying times.… (més)

I’ve had a harder time settling into books since the pandemic. I’ve abandoned as many books as I’ve read. I’m not sure if there is specific kind of book I need these days or what, but this volume of poetry was with several others and a fair number of novels, crammed spine up in an old wooden doll’s cradle my great grandfather made for my Nana around 1893 or so—which looking back somehow seems appropriate—and the volume was just what I needed.

These poems are mostly about grief and loss, some personal, some not, but also their is alook back with the perspective that comes of age. McNair is considered a “poet of place,” in this case, Northern New England, so he often writes about things and uses motifs, I’m familiar with, although his poetry speaks beyond territorial boundaries. The poetry I found most appealing in this volume (this go around; is a volume of poetry ever “finished”?) were those that moved away from grief and offers insights and affirmation. Here, I offer two favorites….

Praise Song

There was no stopping the old pear tree
in our back yard. After we released it
from a staked cord, it stood on the lawn
for a month as if coming to its decision
to lie back down on the ground again.
All winter we left it for dead, but in the spring
it law in an island of unmowed grass
blooming beside its mate, and this May,
when I separate their branches
and look in, I find new shoots and flowers.

At the end of my life I want to lie down
in the long grass with one arm by my side
lifting me up as I read out to her with all the others
and she reaches back. I want to know nothing
but the humming and fumbling of bees
carrying seed dust on their bellies from my blossoms
to hier blossoms in the dome of green shade.

Telephone Poles

Like our cars, which have our faces,
and our houses, which look down
on us under their folded hats,

these resemble us, though nothing
we have made seems so steadfast.
Exiled to the roadside,

they stand in all weather, ignored
except for the rows of swallows
that remember them in springtime,

and the occasional tree holding up
a hole workmen have cut
to let the lines through. Yet they go on

balancing cables on their shoulders
and passing them to the next
and the next, this one extending

a wire to a farmhouse, that one
at the corner sending lines
four ways at once, until miles

away where the road widens,
and the tallest poles rise,
bearing streetlamp high above

the doors of the town, arriving
by going nowhere at all, each
like the others that brought them here,

making its way by accepting
what’s given, and holding on,
and standing still.… (més)

Fourteen stories, all good, by fourteen writers. The third in order, Lily King's "Five Tuesdays in Winter," by startling me assured I would read the rest. "Elwood's Last Job" by Elaine Ford delivered the bewilderment of key characters. Amusing for me, not for them. Debra Spark's "A Short Wedding Story" coincidentally ended on a full page. When I turned to read what wasn't there I enjoyed the ending even more.

Twelve I read in sequence, but switched the last two so I finished with Stephen King's "The Reach." A wise decision. I don't know I'd say I saved the best for last, but I might.… (més)