Overview

The poems in Visitations contemplate our search for belonging with a lyricism and restraint that magnifies their remarkable beauty and wisdom. Here is the voice of a thinker, observer, friend, descendant, doctor, survivor, a voice of integrity and honor. ""The path is faint but unmistakable,"" Ted McMahon writes. It's a great gift to read a poet who finds the path toward human connection and follows it. -Kathleen Flenniken, Washington State Poet Laureate emerita In Visitations, Ted McMahon sings quietly where he's learned to stand, near ""that thin divide between the darkness and the light."" With humble deftness, through poems that make sheer the senses' curtain, he lets us see who's with us-by memory, love, devotion...-presences who may see us more easily. The poet's grandfather in his ""rough potato fields"" might stand for our ancestors elsewhere, with whom, we hadn't known, we were ""holding hands."" -Jed Myers, author of Can't Be Far and Learning to Hold In Visitations, Ted McMahon journeys through fog and fierce winds to a quiet, sunny canyon and from a roughhewn chapel in Connemara to St. James Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela. He journeys in grief for his losses, but is supported by ""invisible friends,"" hopefulness and his grandfather's blessing, with whom he approaches the top, ""the two of us holding hands."" Strong poems of searching. And finding solace. -Jack Coulehan, author of The Talking Cure: New and Selected Poems

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9781970256048

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Born in 1946 to second-generation Irish parents, Ted McMahon grew up in Oak Hill Park, near Boston, one of the many post-WWII planned residential developments. He graduated from Williams College and Duke University School of Medicine, completed a residency in Pediatrics at Children's Orthopedic Hospital (now Seattle Children's), and practiced outpatient pediatrics in Eugene, OR, and later Seattle, from 1976-2014. Since 1998 he has channeled his love of language into poetry. His poems have appeared in The Seattle Review, The Comstock Review, and The Journal of the American Medical Association, among others. His chapbook, First Fire, was published in 1996, and his full-lengthcollection, The Uses of Imperfection, in 2003. He received a Jack Straw Fellowship in 2003, an Artist Trust GAP grant in 2004, and has served as an editor at Floating Bridge Press and the online journal Bracken. Since 1986, Ted has lived in Seattle's Wallingford neighborhood with his wife Rosanne Olson-photographer, musician, and artist. Lana Hechtman Ayers shepherded over 150 poetry collections into print in her role as managing editor for three small presses. Sky Over (Fernwood Press, 2026) is her most recent collection and she has poems appearing in a variety of journals, including The London Reader, Peregrine, and Bluebird Word. She lives in Oregon, on the unceded lands of the Yaqo'n people, where on clear, quiet nights she can hear the Pacific ocean whispering to the moon.

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