North Northeast

Literature & Fiction

McQuilkin, Rennie

Poetry

Bauhan Pub

North northeast

W.L. Bauhan

The poems in this book (written by the author over a period of some forty years) are based on works of art ranging from Pieter Bruegel to a child's crayoning. Thirty pages of notes, discussion questions, and writing assignments are included, making the book particularly useful to writers, students, and members of discussion and book groups.

Private Collection: Poems, Notes & Writer's Guide

Antrim House

This is the definitive collection of poems by Rennie McQuilkin, Poet Laureate of CT and winner of the CT Book Award. His17th poetry collection and winner of the Indie Book Award for Poetry, it contains his best work from previous books, demonstrating a love of the natural world and management of the worst life can throw at us. The day after their expulsion from Eden, he writes, Adam and Eve get dressed for work and consider "what to plant / in a lesser garden." Since the living is no longer easy and love no longer blooms of its own accord, they are "learning to pay attention." And so it goes in parry after parry throughout the book. North of Eden contains over 200 poems not presented in McQuilkin's earlier collection of Selected Poems, The Weathering, which won the 2010 CT Book Award. McQuilkin's poems are both accessible and resonant, witty and lyrical. About them, Gray Jacobik has said, "Elegant and tenderhearted, replete with sound-play and radiant metaphor, such poems rank with the best of Carruth, Kunitz, Nemerov, and Warren." Richard Wilbur has praised The Weathering, for its "unostentatious brilliance of structure" and "seemingly offhand way of threading thought through its particulars." And Eamon Grennan writes that "Rennie McQuilkin offers us poems of a grainy, poised, exacting honesty. There's a Shaker furniture feel to their mix of plainness and grace. Grounded and unabashedly local, these poems are also 'at home in the sky' and 'in touch with everywhere, ' providing 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 Weathering--in their landscapes and dreamscapes, their weathers, their swift erotic swerves, their family of loved ones, their undimmed and perpetual relish for the things of nature and the things of man--give, in form and content, language and matter, continuous pleasure."

North of Eden: New & Collected Poems

In Coming Through, Rennie McQuilkin continues a series of books presenting poems written in day-by-day order. Eamon Grennan has this to say about the first of them, The Readiness: "Rennie McQuilkin's latest collection, is a wonder. With undaunted courage, insight and an always ready, irrepressibly generous humor even in the face of mortal illness, these poems are brief, brilliant testaments to the poet's stubborn will to praise, to celebrate the radiant ongoingness of the natural and human worlds that he has taken, it seems, into his care. In line after line - like bare willows / glowing from within - these poems inhabit the ordinary world in such a way (articulate, unshowy, practical, undeceived) as to reveal its mystery, the living spirit at the heart of it. Resisting any facile consolation, McQuilkin's poems show a startling and (for the reader) a reassuring cheerfulness of spirit, the sense that Nothing's not alive with possibility. With the shades of Dickinson and Hopkins alive behind it, The Readiness is a gift in itself for the richness of its simple, self-aware, undeceived humanity, its ability to look mortality in the face, and to find humour, even that, in what the worst can be. Part journal, part evensong, The Readiness is, in all its parts, all heart, full of grace." Concerning Afterword, Richard Blanco writes, "As the title so aptly suggests, the poems in this new book read like tender after-thoughts on those seemingly ordinary encounters of our lives which are rendered extraordinary by McQuilkin's keen eye and exquisitely shaped language." This praise for McQuilkin's last book, Seabury Seasons, from the Rev. Dr. Davida Foy Crabtree: "This volume of poems will make your heart swell and your voice erupt in unexpected laughter. It is filled at once with joy and pathos as we dance on the rim of life." And this from Ginny Lowe Connors: "In Seabury Seasons, his eighteenth book of poems, Rennie McQuilkin weaves words that celebrate life and its bountiful small beauties. A heightened consciousness of mortality illuminates the pleasures he finds in his life at Seabury. In 'Halloween Migration,' McQuilkin writes of a raucous but loving parade of residents in Halloween finery, then segues into the Day of the Dead in Mexico and ponders the migration of Monarch butterflies, 'each one an ancestor,' arriving in Mexico after their long, exhausting journey, 'like elders struggling across the finish line.' The poem ends with a statement that sums up this whole collection: 'I love the courage of their joy.'"

Coming Through: A Book of Days

BookBaby

In his new book, The Rounding, Rennie McQuilkinfaces down the horrors of 2020-2021, seeing them clearly but focusing on ways in which he and other survivors have found ways to ride out the storm. The poet finds salvation in the natural world, the arts, gardening, and care for others. He clings to a precarious religious faith, just as he clings to the cliff of the troubled world, keeping his fingernails in fighting trim.

The Rounding: A Book of Days

Literary

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