Twelve Journeys in Maine
COYOTE LOVE PRESS/ROMULUS EDITIONS, 1992
This slim volume of poems (a 48 page chapbook) was released in a letterpress edition from Coyote Love Press’s Romulus Editions in 1992. The chapbook includes prints by artist Marjorie Moore. In addition to a trade paperback edition, a deluxe edition was hardbound in leather with silkscreen prints.
“[This collection] begins in darkness and ends in darkness . . . but by the time you get the second darkness, I hope there's more of a feeling of belonging than there was at the beginning—that is, the whole book should take the reader on a journey toward an identity in rural Maine. In any case, when I wrote these poems, I'd just moved to Maine myself, so I was trying to find my own home here. If there are windows that reveal the inner life of the place as the reader goes along, so much the better.”
— McNair quoted by Linda Davies, Green Mountains Review
Select Praise
"[This book] expresses the deeper culture of our state."
— Philip Isaacson, Maine Sunday Telegram
"A book, with a serious excellence which underlies the wit and narrative grace with which these twelve poems greet the reader. Although the poems have great depth, and work on many levels, they have a most limpid and inviting surface. . . The book has a truth of feeling in it as shapely and solid and surprising as a piece of meteorite."
— Kate Barnes, Maine Book Review
"Who speaks for the small towns of New England? Wes McNair, whose spare and eloquent lines —'this stitching together of memory and heart scrap'— bring houses, landscape and inhabitants sharply into focus. These are poems to treasure."
— Maxine Kumin
"He has a gorgeous ear for the rubbing together of adjacent words...But this mouth-sound is less wonderful than his cadence or rhythm, the magnificent, speech-like, jerky sound of his free verse with its unexpected and accurate pauses, its enforced New England pitches."
— Donald Hall, Harvard Review
