The Weathering: New & Selected Poems

Culled from what McQuilkin considers the most lasting of his poems, the work in this New & Selected displays both the weathering of the poet, who has reached his seventy-third year, and the extent to which he and those he admires have weathered the worst life has thrown at them. The folk McQuilkin admires are a rare and wonderful lot. The book is a cornucopia of characters. It is also a cornucopia of moods and motifs, ranging from humor to horror, sometimes in the same poem; combining hope and despair, sensuality and spirituality, fury at a fierce father and reconciliation with him; passionate involvement in the work-a-day world and an equally passionate affair with the world of art, which inspired many of the poems in The Weathering. Throughout the book, there is rare honesty and willingness to face hard facts, some of them being the poet's own shortcomings. Above all, there is love, not for himself as much as for the immediate and mediate members of his family, which begins at home and extends to all manner of creatures, some of them animal, vegetable and mineral. Along with love comes the equal and opposite force of rage, rage at lovelessness. This is a book for all seasons.