Author Talk: Wesley McNair

LATE WONDERS

New & Selected Poems

“For forty years, Wesley McNair has made gorgeous, sorrowing, wise, conversational, earthborn poems, creating his own narrative idiom.”

—Robin Becker, author of The Black Bear Inside Me

Since the publication of his first book nearly forty years ago, McNair has earned a reputation as an intimate observer and a poet of place—in these lucid, far-ranging poems, he proves his empathy and sense of place are endless. “Whole lives,” wrote Donald Hall of McNair’s work, “fill small lines.” This career-spanning collection gathers the poet’s very best work from the past four decades alongside his newest poems.

Late Wonders includes McNair’s masterful trilogy “The Long Dream of Home,” three long narrative poems written over the course of thirty years: “My Brother Running,” “Fire,” and “Dwellers in the House of the Lord.”

Wesley McNair is the author and editor of more than twenty books. He has been awarded, amongst other prizes, the Robert Frost Prize, the Theodore Roethke Prize, the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book, the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal for distinguished contribution to the world of letters, and the PEN New England Award for Literary Excellence in Poetry. McNair served as Maine Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2016. A teacher for several decades, he is currently professor emeritus and writer in residence at the University of Maine at Farmington.