The Town of No & My Brother Running

How can one talk about such a book of poems? Using my own words to describe Wesley McNair's is like using crude tools to probe a machine made with gleaming, finely calibrated instruments. Even that sounds simplistic, since we're talking of art. What it's really like is trying to play a Les Paul guitar with gloves on. What McNair has done in My Brother Running is truly a miracle. To make his brother's story/poem so real, so emotional and sensual an experience for the reader, McNair gets you first to love this man who sailed the football through the K-Mart and gave the finger through the sunroof of his old American car, so that you don't just sympathize with the speaker's loss and anguish at his death; you hurt from it.And where to even start with McNair's The Town of No? Each poem can be a starting point but also an ending point. Or a complete organism unto itself. I'm thinking of his ingenious observations, such as the consideration of the consciousness of the clichéd thugs in a Superman episode in "The Thugs of Old Comics"; or entertainment of the antithesis of an American cultural value in "The Fat Enter Heaven." It takes either a poet or a sorcerer to look at life from these fresh angles in order to show us more of life, or to compress a concept such as human regret and disconnectedness, as McNair did with the brilliant image of a revolving door ("My Brother Inside the Revolving Door").Reading nonstop through The Town of No, one has nearly the sense of a music video, replete with silos and cows (who had no idea they were lifting their legs but were walking) and farmers in bib overalls-all of them serving not only as the cast of characters, but also as the props on the set (conveying texture and mood), and as symbols of the pull and push of human dreams and losses. But it's one particular poem, "Breath," in which a betrayed man tries to recreate his life's dream artificially, that is the profoundly aching representation of the body of McNair's work, as well as a reminder to me (who has, in the past, been disenchanted with sterile and coded contemporary verse) of how wonderful a poem can be-of what a poem ought to be.

On a recent visit to the exhibition "Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory," at the National Museum of American Art in DC, I was reminded of McNair's voice in the context of a world that is often idealized. As the curators demonstrate, New England has long been romanticized by artists and writers. More recently, it has been reduced to Bert 'n' I coziness. By contrast, McNair speaks about the region without nostalgia or sentimentality. He gives us what many others have left out: real places and real people, including the disenfranchised, the disconsolate, the plump and the limping. Remarkably, he brings the region to life, in all its complexity, with tenderness and love that can come only from someone inside the culture. In "My Brother Running," McNair tells of the world of a solitary jogger in a long poem which expands to explore, among other things, the national psyche at the time of the Challenger shuttle disaster. This is a moving book. I promise you won't be disappointed.