Talking in the Dark: Poems [Paperback]

Wesley McNair (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 1998 | ISBN-10: 1567920942 | ISBN-13: 978-1567920949 | Edition: 1st

In his fifth collection, one of New England's most respected poets brings us the inhabitants of his region as they struggle to contend with life's darknesses: housewives in night school; a tractor-tinkering stepfather who rescues an outdated encyclopedia from the town dump; a boy at bedtime who, entranced by a woman's voice on a slowing turning phonograph, listens "to her fall/ fast asleep/ with the needle/ at her throat." How McNair's characters talk about their difficulties - or why they can't - is central to this volume, as are meditations in which the poet speaks directly to the reader about the trials and affirmations of human experience. Whether homages to "Old Cadillacs" or reflections on "Why We Need Poetry," these poems demonstrate McNair's ability to tell a life in a line and to disclose the knowledge of the heart.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Because he is a true poet, [McNair's] New England is unlimited. Whole lives fill small lines, real to this poet and real to us. --Donald Hall, Harvard Book Review

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: David R Godine; 1st edition (October 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1567920942
• ISBN-13: 978-1567920949
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,759,768 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars mcnair raises his art to the next level, December 10, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Talking in the Dark: Poems (Paperback)

Without abandoning the odd characters and comic moments that bring his poetry to life, Wesley McNair has moved in his new book from storytelling to meditation. As always, his sentences accelerate through unexpected turns, like one of his favorite old Cadillacs floating just off the ground, its steering wheel in the grasp of a proud owner who imagines the car new and himself rich. But these poems dare more than his earlier work, challenging the reader to ponder as well as see. Talking in the Dark is McNair's first book of new poems in five years. He is a New Hampshireman who has lived in Maine for 11 years. His poetry is deeply rooted in northern New England, but his voice is universally American. This has been his ambition since he published his first book, The Faces of Americans in 1853, 15 years ago. The new book's themes are loss, the struggle against life's limits and love. The love is sensual but sometimes unconventional. In "Why We Need Poetry," the narrator wonders aloud at 3 a.m., after finishing a wallpapering job in his kitchen, why the cucumber sandwich he is eating tastes so good. The why is unimportant, he decides. What matters is that you're here in the pleasure of the tongue, which continues after you've finished your sandwich, for now you are savoring the talk alone -- how by staring at the band of fluorescent light over the sink or the pattern you hadn't noticed in the wallpaper, you can see where the sentence you've started, line by line, should go. Only love could lead you to think this way . . . And when the light itself grows larger, it's not the next day coming through the windows of that redone kitchen, but you, changed by the hunger for the words you listen to and speak, their taste which you can never get enough of. The sense of affirmation in these lines is the engine of McNair's poetry, the counterforce that lightens the clueless characters who inhabit many of his poems. He writes of lost people with their their ambitions collapsing and their dreams foundering and of old people with their faculties blinking out. He calls up the humiliations of his own dirt-poot childhood, events that eat into the present because they can never be buried or erased. Even the dogs in his poems often find themselves at the mercy of cruel owners. But McNair's characters are redeemed by their humanity. We readers see ourselves and our neighbors in them. We may pause at first to ask ourselves whether we are not captive to the same ironies and illusions that ensnare these characters, but the quesion soon turns into a resigned nod. We, too, crave what we can't have, fall for seven-day diets and lose our great thoughts in mid-sentence. McNair's poetry has always had three defining qualities: down-to-earth subject matter, accessibility and that saving grace, humor. He is a keen observer of the power of the popular American culture to overwhelm old values and a realist, not a sentimentalist, about the rural northern New England that is fading before our eyes. Talking in the Dark is McNair at his best.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An eloquent meditation on ordinary lives, July 31, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Talking in the Dark: Poems (Paperback)

Reading Talking in the Dark is like reading the inarticulate thoughts of your own heart. McNair writes with such eloquence and compassion about the inescapable realities of life that I cried as much with relief as with sadness as I read the poems. His very insistence on the embarrassing limits of our humanness points to what lies beyond it - a connection to ourselves and one another that defies our ability to understand it well enough to hold tightly to it for comfort, but which glimmers on the edge of consciousness, like headlights on the ice-coated telephone wires of "Glass Night." The poems are written in the clear and simple language of everyday interactions - with an angry step-parent, an elderly relative who's abandoned the strain of an unacceptable reality, the neighbor who hopefully assembles old cars and appliances in the yard, the lover of many years whose very familiarity has a kind of strangeness in it. The mute testimonies of houses, cars, and clothes also appear, allies in the effort to make deals with our individual fates. These poems reveal the ordinary for what it is - an incomprehensible mystery. I highly recommend this book to everyone who struggles to make sense of the confounding mixture of passion, loss, humor, mortality, tedium, pain, and mute love that fills an average life.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very accessible, April 28, 1999

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[e-mail] (New Hampshire) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Talking in the Dark: Poems (Paperback)

I am searching for Mr. McNair's new book of essays called Mapping the Heart. Does anyone know if it has been published yet? Mr McNair Are you Out there?

I missed the New Hampshire Association for Teachers of English conference in Portsmouth. Heard you were great. I'd like to use your latest book in a Masters Degree Independent Study I'm taking this summer. But I can't find it.