Robert McNamara

One of the poems of Abiding Time describes woodpeckers "knocking like door-to-door evangelists" and deer grazing "with the eyes of infants, not windows / so much as depthless pools // where the soul might be." In another, an ordinary building turns "in the glow that makes things seem self-spun from inner light." For some poets, description is revelation. Robert McNamara is such a poet. He plumbs the miraculous in the daily, and does so despite grief and betrayals, as well as knowing fully "how little we are at home in the interpreted world." With an understated formal mastery, the poems of Abiding Time reveal a healing ability to see (as if with the aid of an infrared imagination) behind the surfaces of things to the deeper correspondence—and further, still, into "the tragic beauty of the world."

--Daniel Tobin

Robert McNamara's poetry is crisp and formal, and attached to the world in the way very lively humans are who are both deeply sad, because they are here, and aware of those salvational voices tucked away in the brilliance of things. Fortunately this poetry is erudite, so the present have to do all the heavy work--of supporting a true and wise adult on its shoulders. Read at your peril, and be lucky. This is a tremendous feast.

--Frederic Will

The Body & The Day is one of the most lucid and fully realized books of poems I have read.  The marvelous physical detail and meditative clarity remain in perfect balance through poem after poem and the language is fresh, uncluttered, and totally unpretentious.  Those who know Robert McNamara's work will rejoice in this new collection; anyone else who reads it will rejoice right along with them.

 --Christopher Howell

These are fluid, meditative poems, personal in their memories and reflections on the sensuous experience of love, on the pain of distance, absence, loss. In poetry both complex and satisfying, Second Messengers explores the relationship of language to subject, of the intellect to the personal. The language here multiplies meanings, seeks a sense of metamorphosis.

Mukhopadhyay's quietly witty, urbane, and often irreverent sensibility is both shadowed and enlivened by the turbulent but always vital history of Kolkata, the city of his birth—a place of overwhelming poverty, despite its status as India's cultural and intellectual capital. As he contemplates the shifting meaning of human life, Mukhopadhyay is able to wax ecstatic, in scriptural tones and with sensuous resonance. . . . Robert McNamara's translations, the product of years of correspondence with the poet, render Mukhopadhyay's sophisticated and deeply localized Bengali into colloquial, multilayered English.

--Carolyne Wright