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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781567927429 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | David R. Godine, Publisher |
| Publication date: | 09/27/2022 |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Sales rank: | 756,610 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Where I Woke Up: A Retrospective xi
from The Faces of Americans in 1853
Small Towns Are Passing 5
Mina Bell's Cows 5
Rufus Porter, Itinerant Muralist and Inventor, Undertakes a Commission in Bradford Center, N.H. 6
The Last Peaceable Kingdom 7
The Faces of Americans in 1853 8
Hair on Television 9
The Bald Spot 10
The Thugs of Old Comics 12
A Dream of Herman 12
Where I Live 13
from The Town of No
The Last Time Shorty Towers Fetched the Cows 17
Remembering Aprons 17
Killing the Animals 18
The Name 19
Mute 20
Ghosts 20
The Portuguese Dictionary 23
The Faith Healer 24
A Traveler's Advisory 26
The Minister's Death 27
Sue Reed Walking 29
Happiness 30
The Man with the Radios 30
from My Brother Running
Young Man Going Uphill with a Bird 35
The Secret 35
When the Trees Came for Her 37
Coming for Brad Newcomb 39
The Life 41
Seeing Mercer, Maine 42
Making Things Clean 43
Reading Poems at the Grange Meeting In What Must Be Heaven 43
Driving To Dark Country 47
from Talking in the Dark
The Puppy 51
Old Cadillacs 51
Glass Night 52
Waving Goodbye 53
Old Guys 54
The Future 55
Faces 57
The Characters of Dirty Jokes 58
Poem for My Feet 59
Losses 60
Love Handles 61
Why We Need Poetry 62
from Fire
How I Became a Poet 67
Sleep 67
Voiceless 68
Watch 69
History of Talking on the Phone 70
The Invention of the Present 71
Smoking 72
Massive 74
An Executive's Afterlife 75
The Rules of the New Car 76
Goodbye to the Old Life 77
Driving North in Winter 79
Charles by Accident 80
Town Limits 82
from The Ghosts of You and Me
The Boy Carrying the Flag 89
Kuhre's Farm 92
If You Had Come 95
Mistakes about Heaven 96
The Gangsters of Old Movies 98
Hymn to the Comb-Over 101
It 101
The Man He Turned Into 102
Stars 103
That Nothing 105
Love Poem 105
from Lovers of the Lost
For My Wife 111
November 22, 1963 111
Shame 112
Morning in America 113
First Snowfall 115
Love Story 117
from The Lost Child
When She Wouldn't 121
The Run Down 17 into Phoenix 123
The Four-Point Crown 127
Gratitude 131
The American Flag Cake 135
The Lost Child 141
Dancing in Tennessee 145
Why I Carried My Mother's Ashes 147
from The Unfastening
The Button 153
Truman's Stroke 153
The Unfastening 155
The Rhubarb Route 155
This Poem 156
Kay 158
Telephone Poles 159
Maintaining 160
Getting Lost 163
Praise Song 164
Benediction 165
from The Long Dream of Home: A Trilogy
Part 1 My Brother Running 169
Part 2 Fire 194
Part 3 Dwellers in the House of the Lord 213
Late Wonders: New Poems
The Exit 245
The Tally 245
The Arrangement 246
The Holdout 248
Last Words 249
Late Wonders 250
As If the Irises 252
The Blinking Child 255
On Rewatching Samson and Delilah 256
Night Ride in Walmart 258
Toast 259
In Praise of a Tree 260
The Messengers 261
Maiya's Geckos 262
The Lectern 264
An Apprentice 265
Noplace 266
Where I Woke Up 269
Acknowledgments 274