McFee was an astute and generous reader (although our poetry probably did not merit such attentiveness). He challenged and inspired us, and instilled a bit of his poetic sensibility without eclipsing our own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
McFee has a distinctive voice, marked by a sense of compassionate bemusement at the human condition. He as a knack for noticing the gesture or word that reveals something we didn\u2019t know we knew about ourselves. He approaches language like a curious scientist, seeking to take it apart and reverse engineer it. An offhand comment can set him off on a grand philosophic or philologic expedition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like many current poetry books, this one is arranged into thematic sections. The first is perhaps the most elegiac, with poems inspired by the recent or soon-to-be deceased\u2014a group that includes the poet himself. The first poem, \u201cBrother Ass,\u201d sets the tone, with a meditation that likens his aging body to a stubborn mule that just keep going, a thing of the earth, bearing its burden, the poet’s soul and spirit (a more concrete version of Yeats, \u201cfastened to a dying animal\u201d). \u201cI mortified my body for half a century \/ by simply ignoring it,\u201d he writes, no doubt hearing the root for \u201cdeath\u201d in \u201cmortified.\u201d And in \u201cIn Memory of My Niece,\u201d he looks out of \u201cthe last window you looked out of\u201d to see a bird perched on a branch, its tail dipping every time it sings, and he imagines her ghost pressing it down, as though it were a lever on a toy\u2014a wonderful image, which evokes both her childish wonder and the sound of her song, which survives her. So long lives this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second section focuses on the days of Covid lockdown. I suspect every poet has penned an obligatory Covid poem or two; these, I think, will outlast our memory of the pandemic itself. They display his typical sense of whimsy or bemusement, along with his penchant for dissecting language. But mostly, they focus on how the lockdown reduced us all to our purest human components, like an acid bath. Faced with something new and unknown, he looks at it through the lens of language\u2014which renders it less threatening, more playful and approachable. \u201cThe Word,\u201d for example, notes that \u201cpandemic<\/em> is framed by the word panic<\/em>.\u201d Of course it is\u2014but it\u2019s only obvious after he points it out. In \u201cNo,\u201d he laments the ironic oxymoron of the ballpark \u201cclosed on Opening Day.\u201d And in \u201cWill These Hands Ne\u2019er Be Clean?\u201d he sees his hands beneath the faucet as \u201ctwo lovers appreciating each other, \/ their slippery ups and downs and ins and outs.\u201d A wonderful, sensual image\u2014but one that is undercut, because he notes that they are in fact not like lovers, but rather like forensic detectives, probing every crevice not for pleasure but for evidence of the unclean. The human urge for contact is internally curtailed by Big Brother or the morality police.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The final section mostly comprises portraits, after a fashion. Most intriguing is his focus, in several poems, on the autograph. I don’t think I\u2019ve ever encountered a discourse on the topic, though McFee shows it\u2019s an intriguing concept. On the one hand, it exemplifies our desire to have a connection to fame, even if it isn\u2019t our own. It suggest that we can learn a lot about ourselves by looking at how we idolize. And it begs the question of what distinguishes an autograph from simple graffiti? Is it the medium? The prestige of the writer? The value imposed by the receiver? Ultimately, of course, every poem is an autograph, the inimitable signature of the poet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I could dote on every poem in this collection, but let me wrap up with a section of \u201cA Grudge,\u201d in which his linguistic sensibilities are on full display. He considers the sound and feel of the word, and in just a few lines, give us \u201cgrowling\u2026grumble\u2026aggrieved\u2026grousing\u2026trudging\u2026ridges\u2026grump\u2026gruesome\u2026sludge\u2026judging\u2026drudge\u2026grunting.\u201d A stanza of infinite echoes. If you\u2019ve ever pondered the relationship between playfulness and mastery, this will certainly give you more food for thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a title, A Long Time to Be Gone<\/em> can be viewed as a modernization\u2014or syncopation\u2014of the Latin axiom, \u201cArs longa, vita brevis.\u201d Here is art that will endure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Michael McFee: Long Time to be Gone As an undergrad, I sought out courses taught by visiting instructors whenever I could\u2014they typically did not grade as harshly as the tenured faculty. That was partly my motivation for taking a poetry … Continue reading ![](\"https:\/\/m.media-amazon.com\/images\/I\/41kTwo7d6cL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg\")
<\/a>Since then, I\u2019ve followed his work with consistent admiration. I\u2019m happy to report that he recently released a new collection, A Long Time to Be Gone<\/a><\/em>. If you\u2019ve never read his work before, this is a great place to begin. And if you\u2019re familiar with his work, you\u2019ll find everything you love\u2014magnified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n