The Time We Make in Passing

McLouth’s poetry, while sublimely personal, connects us to the most basic and essential of our shared histories, hopes and fears. The poems, confident, curious, humble or confiding, unmask his vulnerability and caring, which gifts us with feeling that someone or something is “whispering my name.”

This collection of works across decades of McLouth’s career showcase depths of insight, humanity, melancholy, and humor. From the surprising sexuality of chopping down trees in “The Time We Make in Passing,” to the compassion for a veteran’s traumas in “Uncle Bill Dreams of Old Florida,” to the giddy glee of “Park Avenue,” to the graceful gratitude for nature in “Labor Day” and “Loyalty,” each poem offers it guiding cairns, memorable china pots, and essential, gasping “ellipses of surrender.” Ultimately, Gary McLouth’s work “is to locate the meaning/of caverns driven deep/into the earth/by gravities/outside our time/where garnet pebbles/turn notes/in the water” (from “Brook”).

~Holly L. McEntyre, Sanibel Island poet and Assistant Professor, University of Cincinnati

The Time We Make in Passing insists on movement through space by way of place. Gary McLouth captures the geography of rooms and galaxies, and all that moves in between. The spirit of the journey through the time we make is captured in stills clipped from the motion picture of a man living within an unsettled search, eyes missing little, mind translating large. In the title poem, the close reader gets a first reward for joining McLouth’s time as his words fly out in chips cut from trees with axes swung in sweat. The words echo on the page; they sprout into forests well worth preserving.

McLouth’s voice reminds me of an old, unattributed proverb: The Most Beautiful Music is the Music of What Happens. The Time We Make in Passing plays that music in perfect harmony.

~Jim Gustafson, Poet, Author, Educator. Fort Myers, Florida

This is how I read Gary’s poems: his familiar voice saying look here, look there: “I do, I do love/this every day.” His poems are railroad crossings through time at which I stop, look, listen: to see what he sees, hear what he hears. The willing suspension of disbelief. I trust you, old friend. For you, I’ll cross, for you, I’ll love this every day.

~Jeanne Finley, Poet, Photographer and Editor. Albany, New York