In Dwellers in the House of the Lord (Godine, 2020)-McNair's tenth poetry collection-he writes about rural Virginia, where his sister Aimee struggles with a failing marriage to Mike, the owner of an off-the-grid gun shop. The core characters of the book, derived from his mother and her siblings, are part of a forgotten American generation who grew up in the poverty and hardship of the Dust Bowl period. In his recent collection, The Lost Child: Ozark Poems (Godine, 2014), he moves from New England to the Ozarks of southern Missouri, where his mother grew up, though he does not leave behind his earlier concerns about family, community, and America. The struggles of his family poems and others often link with national themes, as in his long narrative poem "My Brother Running," in which he links his younger brother's fatal heart attack, following months of desperate running, with the tragic explosion of NASA's Challenger shuttle. He explains in his essay "Placing Myself" that whereas "a poet like Robert Lowell features a New England family of pedigree connected to the history of high culture.my own poetry family is lower class, consisting of mongrels whose history is largely unknown." He continues: "Where Donald Hall skips a generation to write about his grandfather and the agrarian tradition he represents, I write about a broken family with no real patriarch and no clear tradition." His literary family, underprivileged and post-industrial, is at odds with those of earlier New England poets. He adds to these themes, love and its absence, loss and disability, and the precarious bonds of family and community.Īt the center of McNair's poems and his memoir is his family and extended family, whose conflicts recur throughout his several collections, forming a narrative of their own. Work Īccording to United States Artists, Wesley McNair's poetry often deals with "the struggles of the economic misfits of his native New England, often with humor and through the use of telling details." In his memoir The Words I Chose, McNair refers to the region of his poetry as "a place of farmers under threat, ethnic shop workers, traders, and misfits at the margins" and his exploration of "their American dreams, failures, self-doubts, and restlessness." As of 2018, McNair is professor emeritus and writer in residence at the University of Maine at Farmington. He has also studied American literature, art, and history at Dartmouth College, sponsored by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. In addition, he has edited several anthologies of Maine writing, and served as a guest editor in poetry for the 2010 Pushcart Prize Annual.Ī New Hampshire native who has lived for many years in Mercer, Maine, McNair received his undergraduate degree from Keene State College and has earned two degrees from Middlebury College, an MA in English, and an M.Litt. He has also written three books of prose, including a memoir, The Words I Chose: A Memoir of Family and Poetry (Carnegie Mellon "Poets in Prose" Series, 2013). He has authored 10 volumes of poetry, most recently, Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems ( Godine, 2010), The Lost Child: Ozark Poems ( Godine, 2014), The Unfastening ( Godine, 2017), and Dwellers in the House of the Lord ( Godine, 2020). Wesley McNair (born 1941) is an American poet, writer, editor, and professor.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |