Learning the Angels is Rennie McQuilkin's fifth book of poetry. Depicting love's labors and delights, the collection moves from sensual pleasures to the battle between Love and its adversaries, Time and Ego. The last section, “Balancing,” arrives at a sort of “lumination,” a sense that the Angel of Love is with us more than we know.

McQuilkin was for many years the director of the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, The Yale Review, Yankee, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, The Gettysburg Review, The Christian Science Monitor, The North American Review, The American Scholar, and many other publications.

Read some poems from the book.

Praise for the book:

"Rennie McQuilkin's poems are pungently exact about the properties of the real world: how things look, what they're called, how they happen. In a book which has poignancy, gusto, and many another mood, there is never a false feeling... Most of all I relish in these poems the surprising yet probable way in which a scene or association of images can produce what seems an inevitable development of thought." - Richard Wilbur

"Rennie McQuilkin is a poet with an extraordinary eye. But more than that, he is a poet who knows how to use it. He looks at the hard questions of the world, never flinching, and translates them with a clarity that is rare in American poetry today. Whether he is writing about the world itself, or the world mirrored in art, his poems strike to the heart of the thing and give us time and again 'the truth beyond the lines.' " - David Bottoms

"He has a voice unlike that of any other contemporary poet - so natural, so sympathetic, so convincing that the many moments and passages of fulfilled perceptions occur in these poems like the effortless unfolding of wings. McQuilkin speaks from us and with us in a language so devoid of all rhetoric it is pure American: the natural man is lifted out of himself almost beyond his knowing... My response is one of pure thanks." - Dick Allen

BOOK STATISTICS

ISBN: 0-9662783-4-8
LCCN: 2003091562
Length: 88 pages
Binding: 5/5" x 8/5" trade paperback

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LEARNING THE ANGELS

Waiting up, he’s deep in Angels & Archangels:

lion-bodied Cherubim, Principalities

six-winged, translucent as cathedral windows,

heavily armored Archangels, and the usual

angels for the dirty work, recording, hand-

delivering, and as he now learns, placing a finger

on the lips of every newborn, leaving the cleft

imposing silence concerning clouds of glory.

Now she breezes in, douses the light, wants

to cuddle, undoes, runs a finger along the cleft

that gives the tip of his sex its face of a heart.

It's devil's work, he knows.

At dawn he’s in the dew-damp garden, picking

strawberries for her,

turning the leaves pale-side-up to uncover

the heart-shaped fruit,

and finds the garden snake,

a hog-nose, head up, neck flared and glistening.

Oh you above, from the simplest two-wingers

to complicated wheels of fire, be vigilant,

he thinks, and returns

full of Powers and Dominions. She yawns,

half-rises on her divan, plumps a pillow,

pours cream on the berries. Its blush

deepens. He finds himself

sliding a hand beneath her robe,

along the nape, the shoulders, the spine,

the small, that valley lightly downed—

which leads to what comes over him,

her shoulder blades working the air, her finger

on his lips.

WE ALL FALL DOWN

for Kelly, my student

Her turn had come. She knew

by heart almost

the lines she was to speak

but gave us, God help her,

the truth

beyond the lines,

beyond the book she dropped,

its pages thrashing to the floor

like broken wings--

the truth

she beat her head upon,

bit into so hard

I could not pry her jaws,

teeth grinding--

the truth beyond us

she saw as ever,

her risen eyes gone white

as bone.

I did what I could,

I held her and held her, seized

with sudden love and knowing

we all fall down.

In the end

I carried her curled in my arms

across one threshold

and another.

INDIAN SUMMER

an anniversary song

Late afternoon ripens, the whip-poor-will
begins. Two dragonflies pause,
yellow-striped, red-tipped on a snag,
then blur

to the pond, arched bodies coiled
tail to head and head to tail,
their eight-winged wheel of fire a figment
from Ezekiel

repeated on the sun-struck
surface true to this bridal dance and that
of cloud-white wing-furred caddis flies.
Thistle seed drifts like confetti.

And deeper down in the angling light
past small fry in green and saffron shallows,
a pair of two-foot carp seem lit
from within

the color of he lingering sun,
their roiling in the rising mist of spring,
backs humped half out, snake-sinuous,
forgotten. The stillness of the carp

is so complete each red-gold, black-lined
scale shines separately, the pulse of tail fins
oriental, like the sway of night into day
into night.

LUMINATION

for E. A. M.

The way my mother and I tell stories
on each other
at this festival of light

they're only harmless
to others. Now she leans unsteadily to
blow out the candles held by clay angels

and her fine white hair catches fire.
It blazes, illuminating the terrified
naughts of her eyes and mouth.

Later, still smelling burnt hair
on these hands that put out the fire
with a fierce laying on,

I think how soon her hair
will again be the first of her
to burn, this time beyond my reach.

I've lost
interest in the stories I tell―
my hands know better.

THE DIGGING

for Sarah

It’s that time of year,

the hedgerows hung with bittersweet.

Potato time.

How early the freeze

I’d say

if we were speaking.

We’re not.

We turn our spading forks against

the earth. It’s stiff,

the Reds and Idahos hard as stone

or soft as old tomatoes,

a total loss.

Once it was us against the beetles,

blight, whatever was not potato.

How they flowered, rows and rows

in white. Now look.

We give it one last try, and there

far down in softer soil,

a seam of them, still perfect.

One after another

we hold them up to the dying day,

kneel down to sift for more. Abruptly

in the dark of earth, I come upon

your hand, you mine.

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