Coming Through A Book of Days

In Coming Through, Rennie McQuilkin continues a series of books presenting poems written in day-by-day order. Eamon Grennan has this to say about the first of them, 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."

Concerning Afterword, Richard Blanco writes, "As the title so aptly suggests, the poems in this new book read like tender after-thoughts on those seemingly ordinary encounters of our lives which are rendered extraordinary by McQuilkin's keen eye and exquisitely shaped language."

This praise for McQuilkin's last book, Seabury Seasons, from the Rev. Dr. Davida Foy Crabtree: "This volume of poems will make your heart swell and your voice erupt in unexpected laughter. It is filled at once with joy and pathos as we dance on the rim of life." And this from Ginny Lowe Connors: "In Seabury Seasons, his eighteenth book of poems, Rennie McQuilkin weaves words that celebrate life and its bountiful small beauties. A heightened consciousness of mortality illuminates the pleasures he finds in his life at Seabury. In 'Halloween Migration,' McQuilkin writes of a raucous but loving parade of residents in Halloween finery, then segues into the Day of the Dead in Mexico and ponders the migration of Monarch butterflies, 'each one an ancestor,' arriving in Mexico after their long, exhausting journey, 'like elders struggling across the finish line.' The poem ends with a statement that sums up this whole collection: 'I love the courage of their joy.'"

Rennie McQuilkin was Poet Laureate of Connecticut from 2015 through 2018. 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 nineteenth poetry collection. He has received a number of awards for his work, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, as well as 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 at Seabury in Bloomfield, CT.