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This poet was born in July 1943 in New York State and so will soon be 70. For graduate school, McCullough moved to Iowa City, Iowa, where he earned his M. F. A. degree and then began a university teaching career in Montana. He also traveled intermittently and widely \u2013 all over the United States, and to Mexico, Italy, the British Isles, Ireland, Colombia, India (where he lived for a time and did manual labor), and eventually took a teaching job in Winona, Minnesota, in 1996. When that ended, he became a college administrator at a different university in the same town, where he is now. He fathered two sons along the way and married fairly late in life to Lynn Nankivil, a playwright.<\/p>\n
His poems have always reflected his myriad adventures. Broken Gates <\/em>is his latest collection, bringing poems together from the last fifteen years or so. The book has three arbitrary sections \u2013 Driftless<\/em>, then Westering<\/em>, and finally Portals.<\/em> McCullough\u2019s questioning, searching tone has always had fervor, as if the poet is amazed that he\u2019s still alive and energetic enough to create art through disciplined lines, taut images, not overwhelming the reader but instead offering portraits, some short, others longer, of those he has known or situations where he\u2019s instinctively looked for the affirmative instead of negatives, for the latter are always around \u2013 as we know too well.<\/p>\n Here is cogent memory of a friend:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n GARDENER<\/p>\n In memory of Kay Louise Amert<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>You, sitting on the back steps smoking, glass<\/p>\n of lemonade, as cicadas start up<\/p>\n in the trees. Sweet breeze jumps up from the ravine:<\/p>\n faint bouquet of plum just as the sun sets.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n An infrequent lapse into banal metaphors (\u201cDiet for the Small Planet\u201d) does not deplete from the verve of superior poems such as \u201cThe Cottage\u201d (the marriage of two friends), \u201cRemembering Bill\u201d (for another lost friend), and \u201cWolf Point\u201d (for Lynn, his spouse). Or indeed \u201cAbbey\u201d \u2013 with the epigram for Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his final days<\/em>:<\/p>\n I saw the black shirt of the oracle<\/p>\n disappear into elderberry shade,<\/p>\n shadow of three trees on the barn opened<\/p>\n for a flock of purple-black marauders:<\/p>\n \u201cunk, unk, unk, talulah,\u201d they exploded,<\/p>\n \u201c<\/strong>wittgen, wittgen\u201d in response \u2013 oh, holy<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>afternoon. Never saw him face-to-face,<\/p>\n his words like frozen bliss in the air,<\/p>\n every word an impossible challenge.<\/p>\n A tinge of old leaves, a slow riverbank \u2013<\/p>\n a chance to fall in familiar steps.<\/p>\n And snow falling in the iron light.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There are many longer poems here, shorter ones, all adding up to a fine distillation of a lifetime\u2019s passage in different places. Not that at the end of seven decades an artist\u2019s life is done. No, for some it\u2019s merely a continuation of what one started out doing when young, invariable digressions along the way, but poetry always pulls one back and says: Write \u2013 for you are not a brick or a tree!<\/em> You have the ability to describe this! Do it!<\/em> So Ken McCullough\u2019s conscience and natural inclinations have never let him not<\/em> write \u2013 and we are all the better for it. Broken Gates<\/em> is a gathering, a rich harvest, of poems to savor.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n