Poetry can’t produce a lost parent, but as this collection demonstrates, it can leave a meaningful legacy behind.
After a long career in the U.S. space and national defense programs, a debut author turns to poetry.
This slim volume comes with a brief introduction from McDonald explaining the dedication to friends and family. Indeed, it makes a thoughtful chronicle of a full life and will be treasured as such. From the banks of a boyhood creek in Mississippi to the changing seasons in Colorado, the sections play out their chronologies in steadfast rhyming quatrains. Many of the subjects are familiar to poetry fans—youth, wisdom, love, farewells. Much of the imagery is recognizable too, as in the opening lines of “Springtime,” where “Green walks slowly across the land, / Stamping brown into the sand.” Though it’s famously difficult to treat seasonal subjects freshly, this springtime scene includes a vision of lightning and thunder that inspires the speaker toward a strong metaphor to close the poem. “A new genre has claimed the land,” he asserts, putting a signature stamp on the old book-of-nature idea. The handful of romantic poems, too, draw on much-deployed tropes of holding the loved one close to the heart despite distance. But the depth of true love adds gravity to simple lines like these, from “Don’t Leave Me Alone”: “Today my heart trembles with fear, / Knowing you may not always be near.” Perfect rhyme seems just right in this case, for articulating how terrible it will be to go on living after the beloved departs, toiling onward in the wake of loss. The poet’s involvement in the space mission, beginning in 1964 with the Apollo program, occasions a long piece on this “Greatest Adventure,” hailing those who depart in a “chariot of fire” toward the much imagined “lunar path.” The title of the book connects to this “greatest thrill imaginable” but originates in McDonald’s self-described wanderlust to search for his father, killed during World War II, when the author was age 5. In boyhood dreams, he searched for his father, whose body was never found.
Poetry can’t produce a lost parent, but as this collection demonstrates, it can leave a meaningful legacy behind.Pub Date: June 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5434-3093-6
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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