Wesley McNair – författare

In The Maine Poets, editor Wesley McNair has selected work by poets of the state from Longfellow to the present. Chosen for their appeal to the general reader, these poems honor the full vision and diversity of Maine's poets as they address life in Maine and in all human places.

What is it like to live and write in Maine? Wesley McNair, Maine's premier anthologist, asked authors who are new to Maine as well as natives to answer this question. They wax lyrical on everything from encounters with neighbors and wildlife to embracing Maine's rich natural landscape, and they take a philosophical look at the state of being in Maine. Among the authors included are Carolyn Chute, Richard Ford, Bill Roorbach, Richard Russo, and Monica Wood.

Here Carolyn Chute, Stephen King, Bill Roorbach, Richard Russo, Monica Wood, and nine other stellar Maine writers prove that the state is a superb source of inspiration for fiction. They capture Maine's atmospheric landscape, sharply defined seasons — and an assortment of unforgettable characters. Originally published as Contemporary Maine Fiction, the paperback edition bears a new title. Selected by Maine's premier anthologist, this is truly the best fiction you'll find in Maine today.

Whether homages to “Old Cadillacs” or reflections on “Why We Need Poetry,” these poems demonstrate Wesley McNair’s ability to tell a life in a line and to disclose the knowledge of the heart. How McNair’s characters talk about their difficulties — or why they can’t — is central to this collection, as are meditations in which the poet speaks directly to the reader about the trials and affirmations of human experience.

Winner of the 2015 PEN New England Award for PoetryThe linked poems in The Lost Child explore hope, delusion, family struggles, and lost selves through the people and places in the Ozarks of Southern Missouri. But the most important theme of all is reconciliation, as McNair attempts through these poems to know and understand his mother through the place she was born.

A New England Book Award Finalist. “There's so much life in this beautiful book that it feels like a living thing. Wesley McNair is a kind of Chekhov of American poetry.”—Ted Kooser, Pulitzer Prize winner and Poet Laureate.Wesley McNair is a poet, memorist, and storyteller. His stories are personal and yet speak to our most urgent, universal, concerns. As he writes...For we are all born into exile, saved only by the homeswe dream, and the love that we may find there.Set in rural Virginia, the poet’s younger sister Aimee is adrift in a difficult marriage to Mike, a Trump-supporting, church-going, off-the-grid gun shop owner. McNair brilliantly explores his sister’s life, his own family’s past, to seek understanding. Throughout, this marvelous work, McNair attests to patience and perseverance, and an unwavering belief in compassion and reconciliation, in love’s ability to unite us, even amidst the ugly politics of our time.Dwellers in the House of the Lord is for anyone who loves poetry’s unique power, in the hands of a master, to tell stories of our lives.

“Wesley McNair, an unassuming, avowedly regional pastoral poet from Western Maine, is writing the best poetry of his life—poetry uniquely capable of, and interested in, addressing our larger moment.”—Los Angeles Review of BooksWesley McNair’s story-like poems have long celebrated eccentrics and misfits, the hopeful and the lost, with a tenderness that transcends the everyday. This career-spanning collection brings together his very best poems from the past four decades alongside his newest poems. Since the publication of his first book in the early 1980s, Wesley McNair has earned a reputation as a poet of place, an intimate observer of the speech and character of New England. In fact, McNair’s “place” is unlimited, as he proves in the lucid, far-ranging poems of this volume. “Whole lives fill small lines,” wrote Donald Hall of McNair’s work. He is truly, as Philip Levine wrote, “One of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry.”Late Wonders: New & Selected Poems includes “The Long Dream of Home” the complete trilogy of McNair’s masterful, long narrative poems written over the last thirty years: “My Brother Running,” “Fire,” and “Dwellers in the House of the Lord.” This is a collection for anyone who believes mixing a little sorrow and little comedy makes for poetry that moves the heart.

It is commonplace that poetry is the literary form that best expresses our deepest feelings. Those who seldom read poetry regularly turn to it for weddings, funerals, and other milestones. This Take Heart anthology--the second collection from Maine Poet Laureate Wesley McNair's weekly newspaper column--is chosen from the work of poets all over Maine, representing a wide cultural view of the state.