Overview

A chronological series of poems depicting the life of a cancer patient in the first year of his male breast cancer treatment. Moving, often witty, both reverent and irreverent, the book is a praise song written with courage and good humor. Eamon Grennan has called it a wonder. He goes on to say, With undaunted courage, insight and an always ready, irrepressibly generous humor even in the face of mortal illness, these poems are brief, brilliant testaments to the poet's stubborn will to praise, to celebrate the radiant ongoingness of the natural and human worlds that he has taken, it seems, into his care.

Full Product Details

9781943826506

Table of Contents

Reviews

The Readiness, Rennie McQuilkin's latest collection, is a wonder. With undaunted courage, insight and an always ready, irrepressibly generous humor even in the face of mortal illness, these poems are brief, brilliant testaments to the poet's stubborn will to praise, to celebrate the radiant ongoingness of the natural and human worlds that he has taken, it seems, into his care. In line after line - like bare willows / glowing from within - these poems inhabit the ordinary world in such a way (articulate, unshowy, practical, undeceived) as to reveal its mystery, the living spirit at the heart of it. Resisting any facile consolation, McQuilkin's poems show a startling and (for the reader) a reassuring cheerfulness of spirit, the sense that Nothing's not alive with possibility. With the shades of Dickinson and Hopkins alive behind it, The Readiness is a gift in itself for the richness of its simple, self-aware, undeceived humanity, its ability to look mortality in the face, and to find humour, even that, in what the worst can be. Part journal, part evensong, The Readiness is, in all its parts, all heart, full of grace. - Eamon Grennan

Author Information

Rennie McQuilkin was Poet Laureate of Connecticut from 2015 through 2018, when he retired because of illness. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. This is his seventeenth poetry collection. He has received numerous awards for his work, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the Ruth Fox Award of the New England Poetry Club, the Swallows Tale Poetry Award, and the Texas Review Chapbook Prize. He has received 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 at Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut. With his wife, the artist Sarah McQuilkin, he lives in Bloomfield, CT.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available