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Lovers of the Lost: new & selected poems by Wesley McNair. David R. Godine, March 2010. 160 pages; Softcover; ISBN 13: 978-1-56792-398-8; $17.95.
I have a plaque inside the entryway to my home that reads, “The best things in life are the people we love, the places we’ve been, and the memories we’ve made along the way.”
In his new Lovers of the Lost: new & selected poems, Wesley McNair honors those people, places, and memories by honoring what has been lost – whether symbolically, or in reality.
As the book’s jacket summary notes, “For more than 40 years, Wesley McNair has been writing poems that have drawn praise from reviewers and fellow poets alike.” But like the words of Frost, McNair’s work has wider appeal than to reviewers and fellow poets.
Carefully chosen from previous collections, poems selected for this new book offer a chronological perspective of McNair’s poetry and a poetic life. His poems are personal yet any person’s, readable (almost always free verse) yet intricate.
The poem “Mina Bell’s Cows” asks, “O where are Mina Bell’s cows who gave no milk / and grazed on her dead husband’s farm?” (14). These ruminating first two lines speak already to the lost. The cows. The milk. Her husband. The farm… and perhaps, Mina herself… lives full of dreams… a way of life. This is the subtlety of McNair’s work. The reader makes it his or her own, reaches conclusions intended by the poet – and conclusions, feelings, and questions of one’s own.
McNair speaks for the silent lost as he often mentions animals—whether gritty and unimaginable such as, “And the great bulls / remain on their knees, / unable to remember / how to stand” in “Killing the Animals” (25), or “Foolish dog, to forget where he is / and wander until he feels the collar / close fast around his throat, then cry / all over again about the little space / in which he finds himself” in “The Puppy” (62), or in the gentle way he refers to “Charles” in “Charles by Accident”: “no one could quite pat him or say / good boy enough, and why sometimes, / asleep, he mourned, working his legs / as if running to a place he could never / reach,” (97-98).
By-gone ways are remembered and honored with detail, sorrow, and humor. McNair writes in “The Man with the Radios”: “he kneels / among old radios, left / from a time of belief / in radios,” (28-29). From “History of Talking on the Phone”: “talking on the phone rapidly advanced / to contacting someone by phone, / or explaining what one wanted into a machine. / The voice, now a filed message, / was what one listened to all alone,” (91-92). And in “The Last Black and White TV”: “When they kicked // their sets or pounded them, it was mostly / because the picture was starting to roll” (119).
The selection follows a continuum that deals with difficult childhood issues, working, observing, writing, loving, losing, and healing. McNair honors, celebrates, and forgives. Nowhere is the hope to gain more than one has lost as evident than in “How I Became a Poet”: “I learned by writing / to negotiate between what I had, / and that more distant thing I dreamed of” (79).
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The new poems are raw, tender, and touching. In the title poem, “The Lover” we are introduced to hope that flies in the face of odds and loss: “and even the house / he builds room by room in his mind / with his aging, gesticulating hands” (147). McNair uses “First Snowfall” to culminate into the ultimate panorama of all that is lost. Like many of his poems, it is set specifically in our corner in Maine. We see a barn collapsing, we feel desolation as the “last, lost / roof is now far away / and all gone / and good night” (154). “Love Poem” (134-136) is a multifaceted reflection – by way of looking into a pond at sunset – on two lives, and on everything and everyone that has gone before and is present now – mirrored, but pierced with the call of a loon. And there is, at the end, the three-fold poem – a telling of a “Love Story” in this book dedicated to his wife, Diane – the poem and story at once “a prayer,” “an agreement,” and “a blessing” (154-155).
With the acclaim he has accrued as a poet – in Maine, New England, nationally, and internationally – we are fortunate to claim McNair as one of our own. His poems are deeply rooted here. Like “Mina Bell’s Cows” that asks “O where,” “Kuhre’s Farm” asks “Oh where is the oval mirror that held / each face above the wash basin / in the great kitchen,” and speaks to a life never to be recaptured: “Oh I am held still inside a silo in that place / of love promised and work going on, / treading and treading in the green rain / of silage that fell from a high window forever” (108, 111).
New England poet Mary Oliver advises new poets in A Poetry Handbook, “I like to say that I write poems for a stranger who will be born in some distant country hundreds of years from now” (Harcourt, 1994, 110). She does not say she aspires to write for poets or reviewers hundreds of years from now. This is the broad appeal of McNair’s work. It is for the poet, for everyone – for us -for we are all, in our own ways, Lovers of the Lost.
Editor’s note: Mr. McNair will read from his new book, Lovers of the Lost 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 1 at UMF’s The Landing in the Olsen Student Center. The event is free and open to the public.
