Down East Books, 2003
244 pp., $25
For too many of us, poetry is something to be avoided. There are unpleasant memories of unyielding quatrains being shoved down our adolescent throats. There’s the cultural “sissification” factor in a country that prides itself on tough, roll-up-your-sleeves machismo. Yet poetry, as Wesley McNair shows us in this excellent collection, is where you find it.
Castine resident Philip Booth sees it in “Eaton’s Boatyard,” (p. 39) a place of thriftiness and making do, where it’s possible to find “the piece that already may fit” somewhere in the “culch” of seemingly unrelated items.
May Sarton, who lived in York for her last 20 years, found it in the wild creatures with whom she shared her woods, including “the plump raccoon” for whom she represented “[a]n ash can that was surely heaven-sent.”
And Elizabeth Coatsworth, who lived for many years in Nobleboro, saw a whale-spout at twilight, when the sea is “rearranging its islands for the night, changing its ocean blues.”
His object, McNair says in his introduction, was to show “the rich heritage” of Maine’s poets from Longfellow to the present; he’s included 38 of them. Many of the poems refer to nature and sense of place: Paul Nelson writes of a day in Machias with the “bluefish down from the west, chasing “pogies”/ clear under the falls in a thrash of blood,/ under the stilted balcony of Helen’s Restaurant.” And Rockland-born Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose life took her away from Maine, awakens far inland longing for “one salt smell of the sea once more.”
There is an engagement with people and their history: Robert Chute revisits the long-gone farmstead of a veteran of the Revolution, who “returned from Valley Forge/ with honor and a useless arm/ which must have made this hardscrabble/ farm on the coast of Maine/ even harder…”
And, because Maine is a place that values individual expression, it shows up in the poetry, too. Mekeel McBride, a Kittery resident whose poetry I hadn’t seen before but will now seek out, invites us to ride along in “that boaty pink Cadillac from 1959 with the huge fins” – a poem that makes you chortle out loud.
Not all of the poems are about Maine itself, but they all deal with our human condition. Baron Wormser, the state’s poet laureate, writes of a mall north of Miami where “the ghosts of south Florida gather,” their spirit world unrecognized by the cleaning crews made up of workers from Central America: “Some of the spirits/ Want to help but no one likes to be tapped/ On the shoulder by a ghost.” Indeed.
These are poems that invite reading aloud, with friends or family. People used to do that, before television. Perhaps they could again.
A small quibble: This book follows the current style of placing each poem in lonely splendor on its own page, with other information tucked away at the end, in the credits and in a biographical “About the Contributors” section. I find it irritating to have to flip back and forth, looking for information about who this or that poet is. Short notes identifying each poem’s original publication date and place would have been useful, particularly to help place some of the less well-known works in context. Additionally, notes on the origins of or reasons for some poems, especially older ones, would have been helpful.