Saturday Review: “Translating The Mysterious” a review by Robert M. West of Michael McFee’s A Long Time to Be Gone (2022) in NCLR Online Winter 2024.
We’re sharing some new book reviews from our forthcoming Winter issue, beginning with the recently announced Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry: Michael McFee’s A Long Time to Be Gone.
This is McFee’s tenth full-length poetry collection, his second to win the prestigious Roanoke-Chowan Award from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association (first in 2001 for Earthly). West writes of the award-winning collection, “McFee is a consistently rewarding poet, producing one excellent book after another, but his latest is surely one of his very best…” No small thing.
West pulls out some poems he finds particularly worthy, including “Brother Ass,” “Of Breath, and “Festival,” and “A Grudge.” There are through-lines, naturally, to the different sections of the book, and West points out that awareness of aging is one. He remarks, “It’s wonderful to find McFee writing even more brilliantly well into his sixties.”
Congratulations to Michael McFee, who will receive the Roanoke-Chowan Award Friday, December 8, at 1:00, in the auditorium of the Archives & History/State Library Bldg. in Raleigh. Find more information and a link to stream the event here.
Read the entire review and buy the book from your local independent bookstore.
