North of Eden

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 McQuilkin's earlier collection of Selected Poems, The Weathering, which won the 2010 CT Book Award. McQuilkin's 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. There’s 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, I’d 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.”