Welkin

Aaron McCollough

Selected for the 2002 Sawtooth Poetry Prize by Brenda Hillman

A curious hybrid of tradition and innovation, Aaron McCollough’s debut collection offers an array of almost echolalic sonnets, pantoums, rondeaus, free-verse lyrics, and open-field compositions. The formal maneuvers participate in the book’s concern with excavating meaningful, viable varieties of spiritual and social experience in an individualized, relativistic universe. The speaker in Welkin is at once thrilled and terrified to be “blessed/ with this. Much light. In this. Much time.” Every moment in this remarkable book is taken up with lapidary attention and put aside with a mixture of anticipation and remorse.

“Aaron McCollough has reclaimed (that is, radically reclaimed) a certain ancientness of praise and quest, credence and address, for our fractured present. The resulting poems resonate with a singular music, urgency, and substance.”—Michael Palmer

“McCollough’s Welkin, a revival of those energies which flow between the gorgeous happenstance of Earth and the serene mandates of Heaven. These are poems of a powerfully expressed vertu. These are flowers that know the secrets of their names.”—Donald Revell

Aaron McCollough was raised in Tennessee. He holds degrees from the University of the South, North Carolina State University, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is currently doing doctoral work at the University of Michigan. McCollough is Suzanne Chapman’s husband. Together they inhabit rooms in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

A sample poem from the book

Eros, Ethos, Economuos

The air is good in here

we say of the pine tree

and breaking twigs to move

the soul with what we have

to stick against the fact

of empty sky.

Just look! Cardinals

have nested here since fall

as we have come to rest

and raise our young

in a dangerous

and tangible wilderness.

Secrets inside we can’t

quite name. Hopes. Shapely wants.

The silhouette of cones,

which don’t resemble cones

in silhouette but trees

upended. Dear, we lease

the stem alive and smooth,

though tearing the bark off—

the wet, green, denuded

careen of this not ours

to love.