Fellow Survivors: New and Collected Poems

In his new & selected Fellow Survivors Al Maginnes is a poet summing up. Early on in this radiant collection (in the poem "Thirty Years of Teaching. No Sabbatical") we hear: "In the end / there will be a roster / of things undone, but somewhere / someone might recall an afternoon when / I said something I had not known / until I said it, a twist of thought / that became true when words found it." Allen Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes, Charles Bukowski and others make appearances, as if the narrative of a life is nothing if not peopled by a sky of personality-stars whose work infiltrates Maginnes' great storytelling. And there is always his reaction to "the infinite stories that go on / being told for the love of their telling," as in this set of lines from "Salt, Fire, What Comes After" "...what followed / and what lay ahead, waiting for another taste / of the salt-rich blood, the tears I bore / into this world I could not vanish from or flee." The guy's a rocker. Someone I trust the way I've trusted others who earned that designation the way you earn your face: one line at a time with always one more at the margins. So many favorites in this generous, high-spirited volume, but I'd be amiss if I didn't single out "Elegy With Clifford Brown Playing Trumpet"-"the body held fast inside / the skin of the moment."

-A finalist for the Miller Williams prize, Roy Bentley has published ten books of poetry. His latest collection, Beautiful Plenty, is available from Main Street Rag.

Ravings from Al Maginnes readers from previous books:

From George Looney:

"Al Maginnes weaves together stories and his own brand of extended figurative tropes to construct poems that speak wisely and with the authenticity of this world in which none of us are 'fully hauned or forgiven.' These poems find beauty and solace in the idea that despite everything we can remain 'willing/ to disk burning and drowning at the same time' just to be here, experiencing this place and imagining the next, where lovemaking might offer 'one way of resolving time' and each of us can hope to be or become 'a player silent with the possibility of song.'

From Philip Terman:

'In collection after collection Maginnes' poetry digs deeper into his passions-for family, for com-munity, for labor, for loss and love. The poems in The Next Place demonstrate depth of understand-ing amd empathy with a breadth of reference that can intimately inhabit Shakespeare and New-town, the cosmos and 'the last dive in town.' These poems represent the best of what contempo-rary poetry can offer, and these are poems of not only a grown man, but a good man.'

Sandy Longhorn:

'These poems may zoom in on the "small matters: of daily life, but Al Maginnes asks the big ques-tions, questions of what a person leaves behind during a lifetime. In these poems of cemeteries, funeral pyres, fatherhood, and sobriety we encounter harbingers, ghosts, obituaries, and prayers. We are reminded that 'the myth says// we all get one more chance.'

Ron Rash:

'To read the poems of Al Maginnes is to encounter an acrobat of consciousness. His poems' swerves and leaps delight and amaze, but most of all they sound the depths of the human heart.'

Claudia Emerson:

'Al Maginnes situates himself in the middle of things, the poet's voice mature and contemplative, able to articulate in finely wrought poems the various ways "we are worn away by the things that shape us.' This is a wise book, beautifully rendering "in the impossible cursive of the world" both known and unknown.'