I had never heard of McNair until I came across a copy of Donald Hall’s reissued book “Old Poets” in which McNair had written the introduction.  A resident of Maine and the author of nine books of poetry, McNair, a native of New Hampshire, was a long-time friend of Hall’s, my favorite poet with whom I had enjoyed a fifty year correspondence after meeting him while at the University of Michigan. I had invited Hall, an English professor, to be the after dinner speaker at our medical honor society dinner in 1970 and we became pen pals shortly after that when he moved to his family home in NH and I moved to Boston.

The cover sets the tone for this volume of somber poems about aging, physical disability, poverty, family and loss.  A man wearing the standard rural New England plaid flannel shirt is shown leaning to the right as he trudges up a hill towards an isolated, abandoned clapboard house which is leaning to the left.  Black crows crowd around the house and a line of telephone poles recede into the distance as snowflakes swirl.  The feeling is grim and stoic, lean and mean.

While not happy or joyous, I liked McNair’s poems very much.  His Poetry Foundation bio begins “Often referred to as “a poet of place,” Wesley McNair captures the ordinary lives of northern New Englanders while writing about family conflict and other autobiographical subjects. His poems often explore American dreams interwoven with family drama and public culture.”  In ‘The Master of Loss” McNair writes of aunts and uncles who arrive to help a daughter with the home of her mother, their sibling, that is so full of hoarded clothes and other objects that they ‘dared venture beyond the door frame.”  Descriptions of farmers, truck drivers, and other Mainers struggling to survive in this life are told with sympathy and understanding and ultimately with beauty.

McNair bears further reading.