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The Essential Eugene McNamara

By (author): Eugene McNamara

Volume editor: Phil Hall

Eugene McNamara’s poetry ponders the textures and contradictions of his adopted city: Windsor, Ontario. Most comfortable in small, non-eloquent, delinquent, unpopular and wayward places, McNamara’s poems display abiding empathy with the inhabitants of these locales, conveying raw emotion through deceptively simple lines in which `voices cry wait / we didn’t want this / and the wind slams the words / around the corners of the empty / buildings down the empty / streets.’ The result is a selection offering poems of humility and grace that empathize rather than intellectualize.

The Essential Poets Series presents the works of Canada’s most celebrated poets in a package that is beautiful, accessible and affordable. The Essential Eugene McNamara is the twenty-fourth volume in this increasingly popular series.

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AUTHOR

Phil Hall

Phil Hall is a writer, editor, and teacher. His first book, Eighteen Poems, was published in 1973. Among his many published titles are: Old Enemy Juice (1988); The Unsaid (1992); Hearthedral–A Folk-Hermetic (1996); An Oak Hunch (2005); White Porcupine (Book*hug, 2007); Killdeer (Book*hug, 2011; winner of the 75th Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Trillium Book Prize, and shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize); Small Nouns Crying Faith (Book*hug, 2013); Guthrie Clothing: The Poetry of Phil Hall, a Selected Collage (2015); and My Banjo and Tiny Drawings (2015). Hall has taught writing at York University, Ryerson University, Seneca College, George Brown College, and elsewhere. Phil lives with his wife near Perth, Ontario.


AUTHOR

Eugene McNamara

Eugene McNamara was a Canadian writer and professor. He was born in 1930 in Oak Parks, Illinois, and received his PhD from Northwestern University. He moved to Canada in 1959 to begin teaching American Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor, where his influence lives on in the Eugene McNamara Creative Writing Scholarship. He published many books of poetry and short stories between 1965 and 2015, and became known for the direct and musical phrasing of his poetry, and for his character-driven short stories. McNamara died in 2016.


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Excerpts & Samples ×

Elevating Device Licence

a man looks up at the sky
as if he heard something
faint and pretty like music
in the supermarket or a
weather satellite a plane
an angel shouting now

he looks down nothing up there
at all and down here nothing
but light off car windows a dog
barking its fool head off and
a man standing under empty sky
with his empty hands hanging
down having thought he heard
something like music and he
feels foolish and alone

What Have You Forgotten

something is trying to get
out from under the bed a
dream so sunken you forgot
it when the radio switched
on a new high pressure area
moving in was announced so
your day began on a new high
it became low in the third
hour dark clouds racing it
was colder something was
trying to tell you it was
there still waiting for you
lying in wait a thing so big
it was crowding the bed so
palpable heaving sobs there
pining for you it will shrink
to a ball when you come back
you yawn to sleep falling
ah then it crawls up perches
on your chest a thing with
feathers breathing your name
telling you the deep story
the bloody the skinny dream
then morning the radio says
high or low or rain or sun
it hisses under the bed again
sulking swelling with its
presence all day waiting
what have you forgotten you
wonder in common daylight
you say you sleep with no
dreams

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Details

Dimensions:

64 Pages
8.75in * 5.60in * .25in
4.31oz
170.00gr

Published:

November 01, 2022

Publisher:

Porcupine’s Quill

ISBN:

9780889844605

Book Subjects:

POETRY / Canadian

Featured In:

All Books

Language:

eng

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