North Northeast

Literature & Fiction

McQuilkin, Rennie

Poetry

Bauhan Pub

North northeast

W.L. Bauhan

The poems in this book (written by the author over a period of some forty years) are based on works of art ranging from Pieter Bruegel to a child's crayoning. Thirty pages of notes, discussion questions, and writing assignments are included, making the book particularly useful to writers, students, and members of discussion and book groups.

Private Collection: Poems, Notes & Writer's Guide

Antrim House

A Quorum of Saints may comprise "the most unusual and entertaining Lives of the Saints ever written." Grennan goes on to say this: "Rennie McQuilkin has composed a spirited set of short, often humorous biographies of energetic, eccentric men and women caught up in and confronting--whether in legend or fact--the toils of their own times, from the First Century A.D. to the present day. With the down-to-earth St. Francis as a kind of spiritual guide, the poet mixes the comic with the awful, the tender with the unimaginably violent, the sphere of articulated spirituality with the ferocity of the secular, political, historical world. Without any of the melodramatic signs of rapture, he can still communicate what is the signal mark of his collection--joy: joy residing in a plainspoken, gritty, close-to-home language, evoking like religious paintings of an earlier age the ordinary world the saints and their often extraordinary actions inhabited. Stories of these spirit-startling men and women are here translated into a modern, skeptical yet always affirming idiom. What I most enjoy as a reader is McQuilkin's own brand of sidelong piety that offers humor, irony, tenderness, and fellow feeling 'every blessèd day.' " In their fierce delineation of crimes perpetrated against the saints of the past as well as their equal and opposite praise of the qualities of mercy and love that the truly brave deomonstrate, the poems in this book are directly pertinent to the state of the modern world, both its crimes against humanity and its potential for true grace. In his preface, the author explains how the book came to be. He writes, "While under the influence of John L. Stanizzi's Halleluiah Time, I contracted hagiophilia and began writing a daily saint-of-the-day poem from late July to the end of September in 2015, and occasionally thereafter. The poems in this compendium are, for the most part, the result of my addiction, though a few were written earlier. One of the saints herein was encountered on the road, another in my backyard, and in some cases they are saints in spirit only, but for the most part they are the traditional sort. My fascination may have as much to do with the energy and eccentricity of the saints as with their purity, though given the current savagery of the world, saintly lives offer a welcome contrast. (Unhappily, a few of the saints are a bit savage themselves.) I also admit to loving the dreamlike legends of the saints and am touched by the way those legends display our need to transfigure the terrible and mythologize the mundane. I do not love the intolerance and brutality encountered by the saints of every period, including our own. The more things change, the more they don't."

A Quorum of Saints

Religion & Spirituality

This is the definitive collection of poems by Rennie McQuilkin, Poet Laureate of CT and winner of the CT Book Award. His17th poetry collection and winner of the Indie Book Award for Poetry, it contains his best work from previous books, demonstrating a love of the natural world and management of the worst life can throw at us. The day after their expulsion from Eden, he writes, Adam and Eve get dressed for work and consider "what to plant / in a lesser garden." Since the living is no longer easy and love no longer blooms of its own accord, they are "learning to pay attention." And so it goes in parry after parry throughout the book. North of Eden contains over 200 poems not presented in McQuilkin's earlier collection of Selected Poems, The Weathering, which won the 2010 CT Book Award. McQuilkin's poems are both accessible and resonant, witty and lyrical. About them, Gray Jacobik has said, "Elegant and tenderhearted, replete with sound-play and radiant metaphor, such poems rank with the best of Carruth, Kunitz, Nemerov, and Warren." Richard Wilbur has praised The Weathering, for its "unostentatious brilliance of structure" and "seemingly offhand way of threading thought through its particulars." And Eamon Grennan writes that "Rennie McQuilkin offers us poems of a grainy, poised, exacting honesty. There's a Shaker furniture feel to their mix of plainness and grace. Grounded and unabashedly local, these poems are also 'at home in the sky' and 'in touch with everywhere, ' providing 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 and perpetual relish for the things of nature and the things of man--give, in form and content, language and matter, continuous pleasure."

North of Eden: New & Collected Poems

Dogs

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Pets & Animal Care

After completing several writing projects, Connecticut Poet Laureate Rennie McQuilkin was ready to "sell his camel," as the Bedouins say. But poems continued to rise up, at first sporadically and then in March of 2017, more insistently, perhaps incited by the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, which he founded, and a "strangely sanguine sense of mortality." From then until late in the year, he wrote a poem per day, often late at night when he fell into "bemused mullings of the day's events." Afterword is a sampling of those poems, going back to early 2016. Written in down-to-earth language whose apparent simplicity belies rich undercurrents of meaning, the poems show that the usual can be most unusual; they encourage readers to look twice at what may seem like minor occurrences in their own lives. About the book, Richard Blanco (Presidential Inauguration poet for Barack Obama) writes, "As the title so aptly evokes, the poems in Afterword read like tender after-thoughts on those seemingly ordinary encounters of our lives which are rendered into the extraordinary through McQuilkin's keen eye and exquisitely shaped language."

Afterword

A chronological series of poems depicting the life of a cancer patient in the first year of his male breast cancer treatment. Moving, often witty, both reverent and irreverent, the book is a praise song written with courage and good humor. Eamon Grennan has called it "a wonder." He goes on to say, "With undaunted courage, insight and an always ready, irrepressibly generous humor even in the face of mortal illness, these poems are brief, brilliant testaments to the poet's stubborn will to praise, to celebrate the radiant ongoingness of the natural and human worlds that he has taken, it seems, into his care."

The Readiness

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Diseases & Physical Ailments

In Coming Through, Rennie McQuilkin continues a series of books presenting poems written in day-by-day order. Eamon Grennan has this to say about the first of them, The Readiness: "Rennie McQuilkin's latest collection, is a wonder. With undaunted courage, insight and an always ready, irrepressibly generous humor even in the face of mortal illness, these poems are brief, brilliant testaments to the poet's stubborn will to praise, to celebrate the radiant ongoingness of the natural and human worlds that he has taken, it seems, into his care. In line after line - like bare willows / glowing from within - these poems inhabit the ordinary world in such a way (articulate, unshowy, practical, undeceived) as to reveal its mystery, the living spirit at the heart of it. Resisting any facile consolation, McQuilkin's poems show a startling and (for the reader) a reassuring cheerfulness of spirit, the sense that Nothing's not alive with possibility. With the shades of Dickinson and Hopkins alive behind it, The Readiness is a gift in itself for the richness of its simple, self-aware, undeceived humanity, its ability to look mortality in the face, and to find humour, even that, in what the worst can be. Part journal, part evensong, The Readiness is, in all its parts, all heart, full of grace." Concerning Afterword, Richard Blanco writes, "As the title so aptly suggests, the poems in this new book read like tender after-thoughts on those seemingly ordinary encounters of our lives which are rendered extraordinary by McQuilkin's keen eye and exquisitely shaped language." This praise for McQuilkin's last book, Seabury Seasons, from the Rev. Dr. Davida Foy Crabtree: "This volume of poems will make your heart swell and your voice erupt in unexpected laughter. It is filled at once with joy and pathos as we dance on the rim of life." And this from Ginny Lowe Connors: "In Seabury Seasons, his eighteenth book of poems, Rennie McQuilkin weaves words that celebrate life and its bountiful small beauties. A heightened consciousness of mortality illuminates the pleasures he finds in his life at Seabury. In 'Halloween Migration,' McQuilkin writes of a raucous but loving parade of residents in Halloween finery, then segues into the Day of the Dead in Mexico and ponders the migration of Monarch butterflies, 'each one an ancestor,' arriving in Mexico after their long, exhausting journey, 'like elders struggling across the finish line.' The poem ends with a statement that sums up this whole collection: 'I love the courage of their joy.'"

Coming Through: A Book of Days

BookBaby

In his new book, The Rounding, Rennie McQuilkinfaces down the horrors of 2020-2021, seeing them clearly but focusing on ways in which he and other survivors have found ways to ride out the storm. The poet finds salvation in the natural world, the arts, gardening, and care for others. He clings to a precarious religious faith, just as he clings to the cliff of the troubled world, keeping his fingernails in fighting trim.

The Rounding: A Book of Days

Literary

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