Waterville Public Library

MCNAIR TO LAUNCH NEW BOOK AT THE WATERVILLE PUBLIC LIBRARY

Monday, October 27, 2014 * 6:30p

On Monday, October 27, 2014 at the Waterville Public Library, Maine Poet Laureate Wesley McNair will launch his latest poetry collection, The Lost Child, Ozark Poems. His reading will begin at 6:30p.

The book represents a new departure for McNair. Long a poet of New England places, he takes a new path, writing about his mother's homeplace in the Ozarks of southern Missouri. “My mother was always tight-lipped about her feelings, and I wanted to know her more deeply by exploring the hill country where she grew up during the Dust Bowl Period,” he says, adding, “There are poems about her, too, woven all through it.”

When he began, his mother had been admitted at an acute care center, with only a few months left to live, and by the time he completed it, she had died. “The poems were inspired by the grief I felt and the need to reconcile with her,” McNair says. “But after her death, I also wrote to remember her.”

Wesley McNair has been invited twice to read his poems by the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and he has won numerous awards for his poetry over the years. At the library event, he will not only read poems from The Lost Child, but explain how the collection evolved and how its poems have influenced him. 

This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided.