Eamon Grennan has this to say about The Weathering: “Rennie McQuilkin offers poems of a grainy, poised, exacting honesty. There’s sort of Shaker furniture feel to their mix of plainness and grace. Grounded and unabashedly local as they are, these poems can yet be ‘at home in the sky’ and ‘in touch with everywhere,’ offering a deep reading of a truly examined life. McQuilkin balances with elegance the practical, erotic, and mindful zones of his experience, infusing the quotidian with a sense of something nearly numinous. To risk a large formulation, which McQuilkin would likely shrug off, I’d say his is, at root, a redemptive vision, an ability to encounter tough truths, and by encountering them without flinching, to come through. Quietly vigilant, affectionate yet scrupulous and at times humorously wry, the poems in The Weatheringin their landscapes and dreamscapes, their weathers, their swift erotic swerves, their family of loved ones, their undimmed, perpetual relish for the things of nature and the things of mangive, in form and content, language and matter, continuous pleasure.” Gray Jacobik adds, “Rennie McQuilkin writes in the gracious and prized practice of poetry’s high calling, the American Romantic tradition. The poems in The Weathering, a gathering of new and selected work, excel in conception, execution, passion, and musicality. McQuilkin’s diction is rich yet never overblown, and his syntax carries the full burden of each poem’s meaning with a brook’s easy sinuosities. And yet individual persons, in the midst of calamity or triumph, deeply and compassionately regarded, are at the center of each work, as are an extensive range of subjectsthe art we make, our relationship to the sweet and sometimes-harsh Earth, our many physical and spiritual chastisements. Elegant and tenderhearted, replete with sound-play and radiant metaphor, such poems rank with the best of Carruth, Kunitz, Nemerov, and Warren. In these flashy, frantic, noisy times, poems of McQuilkin’s precision and subtle control, whose razzle-dazzle comes from the depths and not the surfaces of experience, are far too easily overlooked. The cost of such neglect is inestimable.” Other reviewers have been equally enthusiastic. Richard Wilbur has praised McQuilkin’s new book, his tenth, for its “unostentatious brilliance of structure” and “seemingly offhand way of threading thought through its particulars.” Rennie McQuilkin’s poetry has been published by The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The American Scholar, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, Crazyhorse, and other journals. He is the author of ten poetry collections, three of which have won awards, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as the State of Connecticut. For many years he directed the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival at Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, CT, and subsequently founded Antrim House Books, which publishes the work of Northeastern poets. In 2003 he received the Connecticut Center for the Book’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He and his wife, the artist Sarah McQuilkin, live in Simsbury, CT. In 2010 The Weathering won The Connecticut Book Award for Poetry, an annual award presented by the Connecticut Center for the Book, which operates under the aegis of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress. In 2011, The Weathering was honorably mentioned for the Hoffer Award in Poetry. The citation reads as follows: "Throughout McQuilkin's latest collection, including both new and selected work from the years 1969 to 2009, readers will find a lifetime of practiced performance by a master confident of his clear eye and in his finely tuned perceptions. His poems are models of hymn-like musicality in calm accord with his simply stated but sharply drawn recollections, histories, observations and personal tales. We recognize a profound attention to the often-undervalued richness of our everyday world. We can feel comfortably at home in Rennie McQuilkin's beautifully wrought compositions; they define a provenance and declare a value for a vanishing birthright we are loath to lose." For other books by Rennie McQuilkin, see the Antrim House catalog. Click here to read sample poems. And for a Garrison Keillor reading of "The Digging," go to Writer's Almanac, Oct. 27, 2009. And for a reading from The Weathering and North Northeast, click here Click here to view Rennie McQuilkin’s upcoming events Click here to read ancillary material in the Seminar Room |
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BOOK STATISTICS ISBN 978-0-9798451-7-8
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MORNING Lying alone in the straight and narrow bed to the room Father had not yet expelled me from, with the rustle of pheasants in the pine, and finally the high-pitched bellsound of bottles and beyond the veil of her hair the light would grow and I’d uncrinkle the stiff paper cap of a narrow-necked bottle and lick the cream from its underside, the thick sweet cream, |
WAR NEWS At breakfast with father, For all its British silver, it was Byzantine Or So I say now Still, the paper stayed up, the test less furious watched his hand emerge, huge sweeten, I would study harder, |
CEREMONY, INDIAN SUMMER The afternoon ripens, the whip-poor-will resume their ritual, arched bodies coiled above the bridal dance And deeper down in the angling light the color of the lingering sun, is so complete each red-gold, black-lined |
LAST
in the Kuznetsk Alatau Mountains, Southern Siberia He and she are old. They are dying. Perhaps not today whose word for him means “loco local.” No matter. No one needs such words This is the way evolution works. It doesn’t protect The universe has no use for the senseless song of her palm, map unauthorized by the authorities, map |
ON ASSIGNMENT IN UGANDA
after a Newsweek photograph, 4/3/2000, by Peter Andrews I focus my lens on the boy’s upper lip He has turned from the broken wall of locked inside, charred He holds a sprig of rosemary to keep his lower lip from trembling, to release a scream. Let it be shrill |
BAPTISM
after “Baptism in Kansas,” John Steuart Curry Things keep going on the way they do I remember how hot it wasnot a creak We stood around. Six lined up. Mostly, I went along with the hymnbook I was ready for something like the cat And her gown, wet through, was true to her |
THE LIGHTERS
for my mother In her eighty-ninth year she’s reducing on one her husband’s initials, full of antique gap-toothed keys with elaborate where every night the dry-bones come |