North of Eden: New & Collected Poems

This is the definitive collection of poems by Rennie McQuilkin Poet Laureate of CT and winner of the CT Book Award. His17th poetry collection and winner of the Indie Book Award for Poetry it contains his best work from previous books demonstrating a love of the natural world and management of the worst life can throw at us. The day after their expulsion from Eden he writes Adam and Eve get dressed for work and consider what to plant / in a lesser garden. Since the living is no longer easy and love no longer blooms of its own accord they are learning to pay attention. And so it goes in parry after parry throughout the book. North of Eden contains over 200 poems not presented in McQuilkins earlier collection of Selected Poems The Weathering which won the 2010 CT Book Award. McQuilkins poems are both accessible and resonant witty and lyrical. About them Gray Jacobik has said Elegant and tenderhearted replete with sound-play and radiant metaphor such poems rank with the best of Carruth Kunitz Nemerov and Warren. Richard Wilbur has praised The Weathering for its unostentatious brilliance of structure and seemingly offhand way of threading thought through its particulars. And Eamon Grennan writes that Rennie McQuilkin offers us poems of a grainy poised exacting honesty. Theres a Shaker furniture feel to their mix of plainness and grace. Grounded and unabashedly local these poems are also at home in the sky and in touch with everywhere providing a deep reading of a truly examined life. McQuilkin balances with elegance the practical erotic and mindful zones of his experience infusing the quotidian with a sense of something nearly numinous. To risk a large formulation which McQuilkin would likely shrug off Id say his is at root a redemptive vision an ability to encounter tough truths and by encountering them without flinching to come through. Quietly vigilant affectionate yet scrupulous and at times humorously wry the poems in The Weathering--in their landscapes and dreamscapes their weathers their swift erotic swerves their family of loved ones their undimmed and perpetual relish for the things of nature and the things of man--give in form and content language and matter continuous pleasure.