Poetry. "Aaron McCollough has reclaimed (that is, radically reclaimed) a certain ancientness of praise and quest, credence and address, for our fractured present. The resulting poems resonate with a singular music, urgency, and substance. In short, WELKIN is both an inventive and immediately rewarding collection, and one rich with promise"--Michael Palmer. Aaron McCollough was raised in Tennessee and holds degrees from the University of the South, North Carolina State University, and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is currently doing doctoral work at the University of Michigan. WELKIN was the winner of the Sawtooth Prize in Poetry for 2002, selected by Brenda Hillman.

Welkin

Literature & Fiction

McCollough, Aaron

Poetry

Ahsahta Press

Poetry. McCollough's concerns with ethical living and the ethical treatment of others, especially strangers, permeate this third collection of his work. Named for the 4x4 cell in the Tower of London, LITTLE EASE takes the idea of imprisonment as something that can be elective, as marital fidelity, religious beliefs, and staying true to one's ethical system generally are. "The voice speaking from these poems is always that of a prisoner," McCollough says, "sometimes very happily so." "[McCollough] takes his palette from the social and religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the grip of a 'personal God' began to tighten. Aaron McCollough is a poet of prodigious powers, able to take the full of his poetic inheritance and to make essential poetry at the center of our own ferocious gyre"--Susan Wheeler.

Little Ease

“I guess an iceflow came through / to take the road,” writes Aaron McCollough in Rank, a richly strange sequence of poems in which forces of nature, mind, spirit, and language partake of each other in vibrant and shifting ways. “I can only guess that would / destroy these remains slowly,” McCollough continues. Indeed, Rank seeks to recover sources of imaginative meaning from the unsettled remnants of lyric tradition, seeking out possibilities for belief and sustenance in the echoes of lapsed poetic speech and song. In language that is dense, allusive, by turns trancelike and mordantly funny, McCollough descends into the ranks of disintegrating organic life and finds elemental processes of regeneration underway, “ivy suckers climbing / the knock kneed craning bridge / to that bright food.” This is work that emerges in the aftermath of declining systems of hierarchy and order, a site marked by the overlapping of occult practices and postmodern physics, tense meditation, and economic anonymity. McCollough gives rise to a voice that is as much vegetative as human, as deeply embedded in the loam of cultural memory as it is new, original, and lavishly daring.

Rank (Kuhl House Poets)

University Of Iowa Press

Salms navigates the ancient, vexed lyric landscape of the biblical psalm, where gratitude is arrived at through complaint and yearning is smuggled in alongside tribute. Formally restless and diverse, Aaron McCollough's style moves from flinty Anglo-Norman terseness through folktale to long-lined, journal-like confessional. The poems' sounds and forms bind to the divine histories of the Western lyric tradition at points of fragility and potential disintegration. &nbsp;

Salms (Kuhl House Poets)

Poetry. Aaron McCollough's fifth book, UNDERLIGHT, is a dialogue of selves progressing through the Möbius turns of innocence and experience, materiality and faith, despair and reason. UNDERLIGHT is a lyric inquiry into the problems of being and community. It opens itself gradually outward to embrace complication but also accountability as redemptive virtues in a life always on the brink of nihilism. "Aaron McCollough's poetry is a living system that is one part the assaulted world and one part the world's conscious surveyor. In UNDERLIGHT 'a private sorrow drapes' revealing an ecology of disappointment where the poet reports 'hearing at least feels like holding and where else does it go.' While the music here plumbs various shapes a final hour can take, it also insists we should never agree to an end without first having our most heartfelt say, 'Making love, we used the dark for leverage.' UNDERLIGHT is full of such impossible machines all doing emergency work."—Peter Richards

Underlight

Ugly Duckling Presse