In this anthology, former Maine Poet Laureate Wesley McNair has collected the work of Maine poets that were featured in his popular column, "Take Heart." Featuring a poem each week, the columns ran in thirty newspapers across the state and reached more than a quarter of a million readers. These are poems about longing and pleasure and death and love, poems about natural world, poems that will inspire tears and laughter and help you carry on--poems from the heart, all penned by Maine writers, whose astonishing vision this book celebrates.

Here Carolyn Chute, Stephen King, Bill Roorbach, Richard Russo, Monica Wood, and nine other stellar Maine writers prove that the state is a superb source of inspiration for fiction. They capture Maine's atmospheric landscape, sharply defined seasons -- and an assortment of unforgettable characters. Originally published as Contemporary Maine Fiction, the paperback edition bears a new title. Selected by Maine's premier anthologist, this is truly the best fiction you'll find in Maine today.

In The Maine Poets, editor Wesley McNair has selected work by poets of the state from Longfellow to the present. Chosen for their appeal to the general reader, these poems honor the full vision and diversity of Maine's poets as they address life in Maine and in all human places.

“Wesley McNair, an unassuming, avowedly regional pastoral poet from Western Maine, is writing the best poetry of his life—poetry uniquely capable of, and interested in, addressing our larger moment.”—Los Angeles Review of Books Wesley McNair’s story-like poems have long celebrated eccentrics and misfits, the hopeful and the lost, with a tenderness that transcends the everyday. This career-spanning collection brings together his very best poems from the past four decades alongside his newest poems. Since the publication of his first book in the early 1980s, Wesley McNair has earned a reputation as a poet of place, an intimate observer of the speech and character of New England. In fact, McNair’s “place” is unlimited, as he proves in the lucid, far-ranging poems of this volume. “Whole lives fill small lines,” wrote Donald Hall of McNair’s work. He is truly, as Philip Levine wrote, “One of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry.” Late Wonders: New & Selected Poems includes “The Long Dream of Home” the complete trilogy of McNair’s masterful, long narrative poems written over the last thirty years: “My Brother Running,” “Fire,” and “Dwellers in the House of the Lord.” This is a collection for anyone who believes mixing a little sorrow and little comedy makes for poetry that moves the heart.

"Old Poets is an indispensable jewel." -Washington Post "An astonishing array of encounters...Hall's observations are shrewd and generous." -Boston Globe Intimate portraits of great poets in old age, giving new insight into their work and their lives, and context to the often flawless art created by flawed human beings. The best of themselves endure, and the old poets' existence and endurance gives readers courage to pursue their own vision. Donald Hall (Essays After Eighty and A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety) knew a great deal about work, about poetry, and about age. Each of those things come together in this unique collection. We hear about Robert Frost as Hall knew him: vain and cruel, a man possessed by guilt. But, as Hall writes, "The poet who survives is the poet to celebrate; the human being who confronts darkness and defeats it is the one to admire. For all his vanity, Robert Frost is admirable: He looked into his desert places, confronted his desire to enter the oblivion of the snowy woods, and drove on." Hall's essays are once both intimate portraits and learned treatises. He takes us on a pub crawl through the Welsh countryside with the word-mad Dylan Thomas; to the Faber & Faber office of T. S. Eliot, who had discovered more happiness in age than in youth; to a reading where Robert Frost's public persona hid the truth; to Brooklyn for lunch with the enigmatic Marianne Moore; and to Italy and for a visit with the notorious Ezra Pound. By the time Hall met them, each poet was, he observed, "old enough to have detached from ongoing poetry, to feel alien to the ambitions of the grandchildren." Also included are portraits of the poets who taught Hall as a writer: the unfailingly kind Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters, from whom he learned the most about poetry. Along the way are observations about many other poets and the literary cultures that sustained them. Contents include: "Vanity, Fame, Love, and Robert Frost," "Dylan Thomas and Public Suicide," "Notes on T. S. Eliot," "Rocks and Whirlpools: Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters," "Marianne Moore: Valiant and Alien," and "Fragments of Ezra Pound." For lovers of literature, this is a gorgeous remembrance and likely to compel an immediate visit to the poetry section of the nearest bookstore-as Hall writes, "Their presences have been emblems in my life, and I remember these poets as if I kept them carved in stone."

Beginning in poverty and a broken home, Wesley McNair went on, through family hardships and setbacks, to become what Philip Levine has called "one of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry." This memoir tells how he developed into a poet against the odds, incorporating his struggles into his art.