Culled from what McQuilkin considers the most lasting of his poems, the work in this New & Selected displays both the weathering of the poet, who has reached his seventy-third year, and the extent to which he and those he admires have weathered the worst life has thrown at them. The folk McQuilkin admires are a rare and wonderful lot. The book is a cornucopia of characters. It is also a cornucopia of moods and motifs, ranging from humor to horror, sometimes in the same poem; combining hope and despair, sensuality and spirituality, fury at a fierce father and reconciliation with him; passionate involvement in the work-a-day world and an equally passionate affair with the world of art, which inspired many of the poems in The Weathering. Throughout the book, there is rare honesty and willingness to face hard facts, some of them being the poet's own shortcomings. Above all, there is love, not for himself as much as for the immediate and mediate members of his family, which begins at home and extends to all manner of creatures, some of them animal, vegetable and mineral. Along with love comes the equal and opposite force of rage, rage at lovelessness. This is a book for all seasons.
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Editorial Reviews
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Rennie McQuilkin offers poems of a grainy, poised, exacting honesty. There's a sort of Shaker furniture feel to their mix of plainness and grace. Grounded and unabashedly local as they are, these poems can yet be "at home in the sky" and "in touch with everywhere," offering 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, perpetual relish for the things of nature and the things of man--give, in form and content, language and matter, continuous pleasure. --Eamon Grennon
Rennie McQuilkin writes in the gracious and prized practice of poetry's high calling, the American Romantic tradition. The poems in The Weathering, a gathering of new and selected work, excel in conception, execution, passion, and musicality. McQuilkin's diction is rich yet never overblown, and his syntax carries the full burden of each poem's meaning with a brook's easy sinuosities. And yet individual persons, in the midst of calamity or triumph, deeply and compassionately regarded, are at the center of each work, as are an extensive range of subjects--the art we make, our relationship to the sweet and sometimes harsh Earth, our many physical and spiritual chastisements. Elegant and tenderhearted, replete with sound-play and radiant metaphor, such poems rank with the best of Carruth, Kunitz, Nemerov, and Warren. In these flashy, frantic, noisy times, poems of McQuilkin's precision and subtle control, whose razzle-dazzle comes from the depths and not the surfaces of experience, are far too easily overlooked. The cost of such neglect is inestimable. --Gray Jacobik
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. --Richard Wilbur
Rennie McQuilkin writes in the gracious and prized practice of poetry's high calling, the American Romantic tradition. The poems in The Weathering, a gathering of new and selected work, excel in conception, execution, passion, and musicality. McQuilkin's diction is rich yet never overblown, and his syntax carries the full burden of each poem's meaning with a brook's easy sinuosities. And yet individual persons, in the midst of calamity or triumph, deeply and compassionately regarded, are at the center of each work, as are an extensive range of subjects--the art we make, our relationship to the sweet and sometimes harsh Earth, our many physical and spiritual chastisements. Elegant and tenderhearted, replete with sound-play and radiant metaphor, such poems rank with the best of Carruth, Kunitz, Nemerov, and Warren. In these flashy, frantic, noisy times, poems of McQuilkin's precision and subtle control, whose razzle-dazzle comes from the depths and not the surfaces of experience, are far too easily overlooked. The cost of such neglect is inestimable. --Gray Jacobik
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. --Richard Wilbur
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