North Of Eden Ne & Collected Poems [Paperback]

This is the definitive collection of poems by Rennie McQuilkin, Poet Laureate of CT and winner of the CT Book Award. The work is both accessible and resonant, witty and lyrical. About it, Eamon Grennan has said, 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. Richard Wilbur adds, This New & Selected gives us the plenty and variety of a whole lifetime of doing, feeling, and perceiving, as conveyed by a poet who knows his trade. Rennie McQuilkin's poems are spare and accurate, and they have an unostentatious brilliance of structure, a seemingly offhand way of threading thought through their particulars. And this from Gray Jacobik: Elegant and tenderhearted, replete with sound-play and radiant metaphor, the work in The Weathering ranks with the best of Carruth, Kunitz, Nemerov, and Warren. In these flashy, frantic times, poems with such precision and subtle control, poems whose razzle-dazzle comes from the depths and not the surfaces of experience, are far too easily overl³4