I’ve recently been immersing myself in the latest book by an old friend and mentor, Michael McFee. Even if you didn’t know he hails from North Carolina, there’s something in his poetry that tells you so right off the bat. True, many of the poems in this collection, That Was Oasis, specifically mention a boyhood in Asheville. But there’s something in the diction and tone and bespeaks an unmistakable Southern gentility. And I’d say that goes for all his books, not just this latest one. The voice is quiet and reserved, the language plain and straightforward, deliberative and decorous. And yet, altogether engaging. McFee revels in language as much as any poet writing today, maybe more so. He excels at teasing out the subtle and forgotten meanings of commonplace words, and clearly appreciates the physical sensation of mouthing select syllables. One poem in the collection, “Bunk,” is in fact set in motion by a fascination with varying ways of calling out a lie. Similarly, in the poem “Tipsy,” the poet is intrigued by the appropriateness of the word to describe a certain condition of inebriation; the language remains surefooted yet fluid, perpetually catching itself from an imminent fall. The final couplet, which describes a “tilted story / with a beginning, a muddle, and no end,” paints as clear a picture as any of the poem’s protagonist.

The poem “Tipsy” is a bit unusual for one subtle reason: the title is not a noun (though one might argue that the title focuses on a word as a thing-in-itself, and thus a noun in its own right). McFee maintains a remarkable focus on the things of this world—and more specifically, those things that are so common as to be overlooked and unnoticed. In this way, he shares a connection with another NC native, Robert Morgan, who has composed a vast array of “thing poems.” But where Morgan looks with an eye that is suffused with loss and regret, McFee’s view is still buoyed by a an innocence and wonder (and in that way, perhaps he’s a bit closer to Ted Kooser). Closure is not the point—rather, it’s the act of capturing an aspect of the world, like an ancient fly caught in amber. The collection opens with a meditation on the letter “Q” and continues with paeons on or inspired by common items such as salt, saltine crackers, pork rinds, keys, a bald spot, mistletoe. Even the colon flashing on a digital clock—”this heartbeat punctuation between hour and minute”—is worthy, in McFee’s eyes, of being immortalized in verse.

That colon, of course, brings to mind NC’s most famous poet, A.R. Ammons, who used it more liberally than Dickinson used dashes. One would be hard-pressed to show how Ammons may have influenced McFee stylistically, but there is certainly a connection. Indeed, McFee pay tribute to Ammons alongside Thelonius Monk in the poem “Thelonius and Archie.” It seems like an incongruous pairing, but turns out to be rather astute. But McFee is often at his best when he is discovering and revealing unseen or forgotten connections among the disparate components of life. McFee adopts the long lines of Ammons’ later work for this poem, which is something of a departure for him.

The book is roughly divided up into sections clustered around a theme. My favorite section is perhaps the third, which looks back on the first stirrings of teenage desire. McFee manages to capture the sensations without lapsing into sentimentality or the sort of editorializing the might seem natural decades after the fact. In “Study Hall,” for example, a group of young boys gazes longingly at a girl’s “never-ending legs / measuring out the shortest hour, / the quietest period in the history of that school, / as she slowly uncrossed them…” And already, they have learned (or are simply programmed) to overlook her imperfections, to turn her into an object of fantasy. And in “Holding Hands,” the fall from innocence is presaged in the language used to describe the innocent gesture:

The same poems ends, achingly, with the (postcoital?) concern that “somebody passing by / mistook for love our resigned / inability to quite let go.”

The sixth and final section is an extended meditation ostensibly centered on a baseball field in Asheville, McCormick field. But it’s not about baseball, it’s about his boyhood memories of his father, who is glimpsed both in his prime and in decline, just like the stadium itself. There is a sadness and resignation in this long poem, as the poet seeks to relive the past, confirm its existence, and accept its disappearance. And that is, after all, one of the primal tropes of all great poetry.

I first met McFee back in the late ’80s. I was an undergrad at Cornell, and he was a visiting professor. (I always made a point of taking classes with visiting professors because they tended to give better grades.) That class turned out to be among the most memorable of my time in Ithaca. The interest that he showed in my work, the insight that he shared, the challenges he posed, the encouragement that he gave me was unlike anything I have ever encountered since. In fact, if I have any confidence at all in creative writing programs, it is largely because of him.