Location
Scarborough Public Library
Meeting Room
POSTPONED UNTIL FALL. As part of the Ann P. Hammond Memorial Poetry Series, Scarborough Public Library is pleased to welcome Wesley McNair, Maine's Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2016, on Thursday, June 1, 6:30pm.
Wesley McNair is the author and editor of more than twenty books. He has been awarded, amongst other prizes, the Robert Frost Prize, the Theodore Roethke Prize, the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book, the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal for distinguished contribution to the world of letters, and the PEN New England Award for Literary Excellence in Poetry. McNair served as Maine Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2016. A teacher for several decades, he is currently professor emeritus and writer in residence at the University of Maine at Farmington.
With a plain-spoken tenderness, Wesley McNair’s story-like poems celebrate the dreamers and the misfits, the small but hard-earned triumphs of everyday life.
Since the publication of his first book nearly forty years ago, McNair has earned a reputation as an intimate observer and a poet of place—in these lucid, far-ranging poems, he proves his empathy and sense of place are endless. “Whole lives,” wrote Donald Hall of McNair’s work, “fill small lines.” This career-spanning collection gathers the poet’s very best work from the past four decades alongside his newest poems.
Late Wonders includes McNair’s masterful trilogy “The Long Dream of Home,” three long narrative poems written over the course of thirty years: “My Brother Running,” “Fire,” and “Dwellers in the House of the Lord.”
CRITICAL PRAISE
“McNair’s poems are just sharp enough to open our eyes anew—and just smooth enough for us to think such wisdom arrived by grace alone. His work is melodic without being singsong; it is both sanguine and realistic.”
—Nick Ripatrazone, The National Review
“Not all poets are storytellers, not even close, but all of them wish they were, wish they had a better understanding of how words and images bind spells. Wesley McNair is the author of nine collections of stories in the shape of poems.”
—Foreword Reviews
“Late Wonders is the book to go to for either an introduction or a summation of one of Maine’s most prominent, skilled poets of the last fifty years.”
—Kennebec Journal