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About The Prevalence of Mystery, Rennie McQuilkin’s late-life poetry collection, the author writes this: “I present these poems as a sort of postscript remembering the long year following the departure of my dear wife, Sarah. I trust they reflect my enduring love for her; faith in the value of holding fast; admiration of the natural world; and profound respect for those who have shown me the way. Behind it all is the prevalence of mystery.” Margaret Gibson, Connecticut Poet Laureate Emerita, has praised McQuilkin’s recent work in these words: “In these ravishingly honest poems, with his wife’s Alzheimer’s at their heart, Rennie McQuilkin has given us a chronicle of late life as it daily unfolds toward its inevitable finality. These poems tell us that memory magnifies who we are, just as forgetting erases the linkages we have to others and to sense of self. Leave-takings and loss abound in these poems, but so also does affirmation and celebration of connection . . . They celebrate jewel-like moments in the Book of Hours that is our life. They affirm that we make love and home and self and family, that we make song and story. Whatever is made is also subject to impermanence, but the making—the fidelity to creativity—that is love itself, and it endures. Bravo! I say, and bow in gratitude to a poet whose life and whose poems have enriched us for so many decades.” Rennie McQuilkin grew up in Pittsford, New York, received Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees in history and English from Princeton and Columbia Universities, and decided against a career in law after a stint at Harvard Law School. He taught English and directed theatrical productions at Horace Mann School; Phillips Academy and Abbot Academy in Andover, Massachusetts; Schoolboys Abroad in Rennes, France; the Loomis-Chaffee School; and Miss Porter's School. Rennie was Poet Laureate of Connecticut from 2015 to 2018. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic,The Yale Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. This is his 25th collection. He has received a number of awards for his work, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, six fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Connecticut Center for the Book. In 2010 his volume of new and selected poems, The Weathering, was awarded the Center’s annual poetry prize under the aegis of the Library of Congress; and in 2018, North of Eden received the Next Generation Indie Book Award in Poetry. He co-founded and for many years directed the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival at Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, CT. In 2018, Rennie and his wife of sixty-two years – artist, teacher, counselor, gardener, and gourmet cook Sarah McQuilkin – moved to the Seabury retirement community in Bloomfield, CT. Sadly, Sarah passed away in January of 2023.
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BOOK STATISTICS Copies of this book are available |
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