The first time I visited Wes McNair in Maine, he took me for a walk in his new hometown of Mercer. He pointed out a millstone whose words commemorated an elm of 32 feet in circumference at chest height, a tree reputed to be the largest ever grown in New England. Farther on, we paused to examine an impressive pile of boulders in a field. The landowners, McNair said, had cleared them out to start a pumpkin patch.
We had been friends for years by then, and although he had moved farther north just a few months earlier, I could tell he had already begun to collect details and stories that would nourish his poetry to come. “Late Wonders,” his new selected poems from 10 collections, reflects on the career he made of telling the stories he has lived and witnessed.
Local book
Courtesy of Godine
“Late Wonders: New and Selected Poems”
By Wesley McNair
Godine, 275 pages
$29.95
Now 81 years old, McNair was born in poverty in rural New Hampshire and lived there into his 40s. I had the good fortune to interview him for my newspaper just after he published his first book of poems. We have stayed in touch ever since. He moved to Mercer to teach at the University of Maine’s Farmington campus, later became the state’s poet laureate, and is now an emeritus professor.
In Mercer, a town of fewer than 600 people, he soon embraced life beyond the range of the Boston hub. People tend to identify Mercer as being in “west-central Maine,” but in McNair’s view, “it is neither west nor central. It’s way up there.”
When the neighbors realized they had a poet in their midst, they invited him to “Hobby Night” at the local grange. The closing lines of “Seeing Mercer, Maine,” celebrate this milestone.
Would it matter if I told you
people live here – the old
man from the coast who built
a lobster shack in a hay field;
the couple with the sign
that says Cosmetics
and Landfill; the woman
so shy about her enlarged leg
she hangs her clothes
outdoors at night? Walk down this road
awhile. What you see here in daytime –
a kind of darkness that comes
from too much light –
you’ll need to adjust
your eyes for. The outsized
hominess of that TV dish,
for instance, leaning
against its cupboard
of clapboard. The rightness
of the lobsterman’s shack –
do you find it, tilted
there on the sidehill,
the whitecaps of daisies
just cresting beside it?
When I first interviewed McNair in 1984, he told me his aim was “to write poems for the back pockets of Americans.” He has remained steadfast in this endeavor. By coincidence, in writing a poem inspired by a story in the Concord Monitor, the newspaper I edited, he had discovered a way to enhance this approach.
The subject was the tragic death of a man who had fallen from his roof. In shaping this personal tragedy into a poem, McNair found himself also telling the larger story of the demise of farming in northern New England. “One by one,” he said in a recent reading, “I began to write poems about the people around me – people on the margins. This opened the door to life itself.” The poem about the farmer is “The Last Time Shorty Towers Fetched the Cows.”
In the only story we have
of Shorty Towers, it is five o’clock
and he is dead drunk on his roof
deciding to fetch the cows. How
he got in this condition, shingling
all afternoon, is what the son-in-law,
the one who made the back pasture
into a golf course, can’t figure out. So,
with an expression somewhere between shock
and recognition, he just watches Shorty
pull himself up to his not-so-
full height, square his shoulders,
and sigh that small sigh as if caught
once again in an invisible swarm of
bees. Let us imagine, in that moment
just before he turns to the roof’s edge
and the abrupt end of the joke
which is all anyone thought to remember
of his life, Shorty is listening
to what seems to be the voice
of a lost heifer, just breaking
upward. And let us think that when he walks
with such odd purpose down that hill
jagged with shingles, he suddenly feels it
open into the wide, incredibly green
meadow where all the cows are.
In the years after McNair moved to Maine, we often visited each other. With our spouses, we each bought a camp on a pond in our home state. A carpenter built a writing cabin for him near his camp, and I wrote on the back porch of mine. He sent me poems in progress for comment, and I tested my ideas on him. When we got together, we swam the pond and walked the woods by day, played crazy-8s with our wives, and drank boilermakers and talked writing deep into the night.
Over time, I watched McNair’s poems follow the vicissitudes of his life, often focusing on his family, the characters he knew best. Written over three decades, his most ambitious work recounted the deaths of his younger brother and his mother and the difficult life of his sister.
In “Late Wonders,” these three long poems appear as a trilogy. At a recent reading in Concord, I was reminded of them when McNair told his listeners that while compiling the poems for the book, he realized he was assembling the story of his life. He likened the exercise to doing a jigsaw puzzle. “You first see a patch of cattails coming together,” he said, “and then the hull of a boat, the water, and the sky. And suddenly there it is – a sunny day on the pond.”
Beyond his empathy and storytelling, McNair’s greatest gift as an artist is his eye. In details most of us might miss, he sees the human story. He often turns his eye on the natural world, reminding us northern New Englanders that the landscape around us provides consolation even in the heart of winter. One of my favorites from “Late Wonders” is “Glass Night.”
Come, warm rain
and cold snap
come, car light
and country road
winding me around
dark’s finger,
come, flash
of mailbox and sign,
and shine
of brush,
stubble and all
the lit lonely
windows wrapped
in the glass branches
of tree
after flying tree.
Come, moon-coated
snow hills, and flung
far ahead pole
by pole the long
glass cobweb
in my high beam
that carries me deeper.
Come, deeper
and mute dark
and speech of light.
Come, glass night.
———-
Mike Pride is a historian and retired journalist who lives in Bow, New Hampshire. His latest book is “No Place for a Woman: Harriet Dame’s Civil War.”
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