Robert McNamara’s poetry is crisp and formal, and attached to the world in the way very lively humans are who are both deeply sad, because they are here, and aware of those salvational voices tucked away in the brilliance of things. Fortunately this poetry is erudite, so the present doesn’t have to do all the heavy work—of supporting a true and wise adult on its shoulders. Read at your peril, and be lucky! This is a tremendous feast.
Robert McNamara teaches in the Interdisciplinary Writing Program at the University of Washington and is the university director of the Puget Sound Writing Project.
For McNamara, we are never entirely strangers and never complete beings, ever journeying out and back for images to fill the holes we can never patch. McNamara's poems are about how we experience those recurrent moments, how we recognize ourselves as avatars of the permanent, what that feels like, the prosody and measure of it, its sixes and sevens, how we marshal our experience, our desire for perfection, and then launch into the rain, knowing it's all temporary." - Bill Tremblay