Second Messengers (Wesleyan New Poets S.) - Hardcover

"The shock of the new: a first book by a poet already writing with technical daring, an impeccable ear, and a ferociously tendered intelligence . Robert McNamara's Second Messenger - for its sense and its sensations - makes a welcome addition to American poetry." -- Sherod Santos

These are fluid, meditative poems, personal in their memories and reflections on the sensuous experience of love, on the pain of distance, absence, loss. There are wounds here, the universal injuries on which we all harbor, however deeply. McNamara asks, "who does not know/ how resolutely we dress for hard weather, and the soft place/ we shelter underneath?" In poetry both complex and satisfying, Second Messenger explores the relationship of language to subject, of the intellectual to the personal. The language here multiplies meanings, seeks a sense of metamorphosis.