The Holding: Love in a Time of Loss

Rennie McQuilkin

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The Holding focuses on the many ways we can overcome the perils that afflict us during an era of medical, personal, and political plague. At the book's heart is the Alzheimer's of the author's wife and the love it has called forth in him. Presented in roughly chronological order, McQuilkin's poems also address other crises. Subtitled "Love in a Time of Loss," the book deals with everything from the premature death of a friend to the "de-pigeoning" of a garden spot. Always there is an upbeat, often witty tenor to the book, which suggests that the more we are challenged the more we find it in us to call on resources of love and courage that might have lain low in more manageable times. These poems are highly readable and classic in their Quaker-like simplicity. They will make you laugh and cry and cheer for the inspiration they offer.

Book Details

Publisher: Antrim House
Publish Date: Jan 23rd, 2023
Pages: 110
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.00in - 0.26in - 0.38lb
EAN: 9798986552231
Categories: • American - General• Diseases & Conditions - Alzheimer's & Dementia

About the Author

McQuilkin, Rennie: - Rennie McQuilkin was Poet Laureate of Connecticut from 2015 to 2018. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Yale Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. This is his twentieth poetry collection. He has received a number of awards for his work, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the CT 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. He lives at Seabury in Bloomfield, CT.

Praise for this book

In this tender and ravishingly honest book of poems, with his wife's Alzheimer's at its heart, Rennie McQuilkin has given us a chronicle of late life as it daily unfolds toward its inevitable finality. These poems tell us that memory magnifies who we are, just as forgetting erases the linkages we have to others and to sense of self. Leave-takings and loss abound in these poems, but so also does affirmation and celebration of connection. The more his beloved wife forgets, the more this poet holds on, remembering family and friends, paying attention to the paper birch outside his window, to the pigeons making their nest on a porch. And if these poems remember wars, separations, migrations, and climate emergency, they also celebrate jewel-like moments in the Book of Hours that is our life. They affirm that we make love and home and self and family, that we make song and story. Whatever is made is also subject to impermanence, but the making-the fidelity to creativity-that is love itself, and it endures. Bravo! I say, and bow in gratitude to a poet whose life and whose poems have enriched us for so many decades.

-Margaret Gibson, Poet Laureate of CT (2019-2022), author of Broken Cup, The Glass Globe, Long Walks in the Afternoon, and many other works