The Town of No & My Brother Running
DAVID R. GODINE, 1997
This book gathers two of Wesley McNair's important early collections into one handsome volume. In The Town of No, McNair blends sadness and comedy to remind us of Robert Frost's notion that poetry should make us "very sorry" or "very glad." In My Brother Running, fifteen short poems on rural life are counterbalanced by the extended title piece, a memorial to a brother dead too soon and for reasons that can never be reconciled.
Wesley McNair's New England is not a nostalgic never-never land, but a place right on the ground, where signs advertise "Cosmetics and Landfill," poor people drive old Cadillacs, and farmers live on the edge. It includes retarded children playing baseball; old dancers gliding, eyes closed, on love-handles; and a desperate brother who runs until his heart explodes, on the very day NASA's Challenger rocket blows up. Broader than a regionalist poet, he seeks the universal meaning of his materials, linking his New England to American culture in general, and to the largest human concerns.
Select Praise
"McNair is one of the only handful of younger poets willing to take risks. This is, without a doubt, one of the year's best poetry collections."
—ALA Booklist, on The Town of No
"The story of the speaker and his brother takes on a degree of obsessiveness that is more urgent than anything in McNair's snapshots from rural life, and the poem is without question his best."
— David Wojahn, Poetry, on My Brother Running
"Full of poems that are simple and direct in technique, yet profound and riveting in impact. This is one of the year's best collections of poetry."
— Booklist, starred review, on The Town of No
"Wesley McNair has created one of the most memorable mythical places of the decade."
— New Letters Review of Books, on The Town of No
"Not a word out of place, and the lines move down the page with the stark clarity and the patient nearness of a winter landscape developing outside a window...whatever regional cast the poems have is much less noticeable than the powerful moments of realization and description that make these poems live."
— Henry Taylor, Washington Times, on My Brother Running
"...the book's title poem is a masterpiece of both pacing and intensity."
— Philip Booth, Maine Sunday Telegram, on My Brother Running
"A formal tour de force, "My Brother Running" is McNair's most emotionally powerful poem, and a masterpiece of the long poem and the elegy."
— Thomas R. Smith, Minneapolis Star Tribune
