The Prevalence of Mystery

by Rennie McQuilkin

Overview

About The Prevalence of Mystery, Rennie McQuilkin's late-life poetry collection, the author writes this: "I present these poems as a sort of postscript remembering the long year following the departure of my dear wife, Sarah. I trust they reflect my enduring love for her; faith in the value of holding fast; admiration of the natural world; and profound respect for those who have shown me the way. Behind it all is the prevalence of mystery."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798986552293
Publisher:	Antrim House
Publication date:	09/18/2023
Pages:	62
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.15(d)

About the Author

Rennie McQuilkin was Poet Laureate of Connecticut from 2015 to 2018. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Yale Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. This is his 25th collection. He has received a number of awards for his work, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, six fellowships frm the CT Commission on the Arts, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Connecticut Center for the Book. In 2010 his volume of new and selected poems, The Weathering, was awarded the Center's annual poetry prize under the aegis of the Library of Congress; and in 2018, North of Eden received the Next Generation Indie Book Award in Poetry. For nine years he directed the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, which he co-founded and directed for many years at Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut. In 2018, he and his wife of sixty-two years - artist, teacher, counselor, and gardener Sarah McQuilkin - moved to the Seabury retirement community in Bloomfield, CT. Sadly, Sarah passed away in January of 2023.

Editorial Reviews

Margaret Gibson, Connecticut Poet Laureate Emerita, has praised McQuilkin's recent work in these words: "In these ravishingly honest poems, with his wife's Alzheimer's at their heart, Rennie McQuilkin has given us a chronicle of late life as it daily unfolds toward its inevitable finality. These poems tell us that memory magnifies who we are, just as forgetting erases the linkages we have to others and to sense of self. Leave-takings and loss abound in these poems, but so also does affirmation and celebration of connection . . . They celebrate jewel-like moments in the Book of Hours that is our life. They affirm that we make love and home and self and family, that we make song and story. Whatever is made is also subject to impermanence, but the making-the fidelity to creativity-that is love itself, and it endures. Bravo! I say, and bow in gratitude to a poet whose life and whose poems have enriched us for so many decades."

From the Publisher