NOVEMBER WEDDING AND OTHER POEMS

A willfully modest debut collection, full of soft-focus portraits, oblique elegies, and a nostalgia born out of avoidance and grief: “This is not where I wanted to go / but where the backward glance / has taken me,” the poet admits in “Dillon Street.” The poems are all well crafted affairs; formal elements are shapely, though rarely rigid. McCarthy is most comfortable with half rhymes and loose meters, but almost every poem bares traces of an understated classicism. This occasionally makes his texts seem overworked, as though significance—clear enough when left alone—were being wrung from the words rather than developed out of them. In “Prologue,” the poet begins by evoking “half-remembered things”—photographs, roads not taken—and says, in a beautifully tactile line, “Such absences are lemon on the tongue.” But he then continues tritely, “Come, somewhere is a song that can evoke / a new entirety, can heal like poetry / used to, or a first glimpse of the sea.” The line break before “used to” is neat, but does not excuse the passage from the sensual and significant to the deep waters of abstraction. This is a move McCarthy makes too regularly. He’s at his best when he resists a weakness for concepts without intuitions, as in the cycle at the end of the collection, “Poems from the Black Book.” These ten lyrics are the strongest here. They concern his wife’s mourning for a brother who committed suicide, and McCarthy handles the themes of grief and helplessness with surety. His gentle rhythms and half rhymes are pitched to match this low-lit trauma of brothers, sisters, spouses.

Often too somber to be effective.