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Fire: Poems

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"How I Became a Poet"

"Wanted" was the word I chose

for him at age eight, drawing the face

of a bad guy with comic-book whiskers

then showing it to my mother. This was how

after my father left us, I made her smile

at the same time I told her I missed him,

and how I managed to keep him close by

in that house of perpetual anger,

becoming his accuser and his devoted

accomplice. I learned by writing

to negotiate between what I had,

and that more distant thing I dreamed of.

In this poem, Wesley McNair crystallizes what has been going on in his poetry for two decades. He is a poet of witness to his own closed-in coming of age in a poor, fractious family. He looks outward to an American popular culture whose offer of limitless possibility must be viewed with skepticism. In this outer world, you think you can tell the bad guys by their "comic-book whiskers," but it isn't necessarily so. More often than not, what you see and hear turns out to be a trick. The trick can be crude and obvious, like a weight-loss ad, but it also comes in the grander schemes of Madison Avenue and Ronald Reagan.

A fine book by an all-American poet, closing with a beautiful long narrative (the title poem) that is a fitting sequel to McNair's haunting "My Brother Running."