Maine’s Poet
Laureate, Wes McNair, in his tenth book of poetry takes us home to the Ozarks.
Known as a New England writer, McNair here shows us what he is made of, where
he got his early sensibilities, by transposing them into verse. While the poems
are mainly about the invented Sykes family, the author’s mother, Ruth is referred
to by her real name. The free verse poems are laid out in varying stanza
lengths, alternating tercets and couplets for some of the faster reads and
longer lingering lengths for the more intense revelations. The eldest of the
Sykes siblings, Ruth is the centerpiece of the work, written by The Lost Child,
himself. “Ruth couldn’t believe she was riding down the road / on an outing
instead of sitting in the afternoon circle / back at Elmwood, the home where
her son had stuck her,”. The poems are conversational, as if a local person is
recounting what just happened at the most recent family reunion “Remembering
all the sorrow at the last Sykes reunion, / when the family patriarch and war
hero, Homer, / went down at the microphone with his fatal stroke / speaking the
words that didn’t go together, . . . .” or at the Chamber of Commerce meeting, when a veteran is introduced “ . . . and the
blinking Christmas / lights over the crèche on one side of the podium / were red, white, and blue to go with the
flag”. The collection is a combination of recollection of the family and elegy
to the mother, particularly in the final poem Why I Carried My Mother’s Ashes “ . . . the wings of the plane /
lifted me high above the rain clouds / of New England as I carried the ashes
back / to the rolling fields and farmhouses and hot sun / of the country where
she was born.”
The
Lost Child: Ozark Poems
by
Wesley McNair
David
R. Godine $17.95 (paper)
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