Old Rags and Iron

“R.F. McEwen’s collection presents a compelling chorus of voices in different tones and registers, and widely dispersed across time, place, and human experience. McEwen masterfully revives here the noble tradition of the extended poetic narrative, adding richly and intensively to that enduring poetic tradition that his poems at once amplify and enrich. Meticulously conducted and finely detailed in language, image, and emotional intensity, these are brawny poems that we shall not easily forget. They set root in the mind, reminding us, through the moving voices and histories of the characters we meet in them, of the terrible and terrifying adventure of human community, of the triumph and torment that, in all its extraordinary diversity, unites us all, branches upon a deep-rooted tree that reach ever toward the sky.”—Stephen Behrendt, George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln
“We enter the world of these narrative poems like Robert Frost’s rider of birches—a whiplash to the eye as you make your way into the tangled twigs, then a fantasy taking flight on bent branches up through the traumas of childhood through the arc of adulthood, from winds having their say, stops along the road outside Kadokah, the rising White River or Fast Horse Creek, up the tree trimmer’s hold, down the streets of vagrants and rolling bottles, from Chicago to reservation towns, past the complications of families mixed and otherwise, across the waters to the Emerald Island itself. These poems thrust us up and out of the page a while, then bring us back down firmly on Earth, good both going and coming, unsettling and exhilarating in the same sweep. No discussion of Great Plains literature is complete without at least one trip into the understory with R.F. McEwen as your guide.”—Matt Evertson, professor of literature at Chadron State College
“R.F. McEwen’s Old Rags and Iron is a generous and joyful gathering of work written across a lifetime. In finely crafted narrative poems, McEwen gives eloquent and tender voice to the human and the nonhuman worlds that harbor his subjects. He reminds us that wherever there are people, there are animals and trees, all contending with or enjoying the seasons in Nebraska, Illinois, Iowa, and Ireland. Both mythic figures like Lonesome Frank in ‘Hammer Ring’ and an old aunt in ‘A Strong Wind Clear and Keen’—‘I see her still, my mother’s aunt, her feet like freezing soldiers doddering along’—come vibrantly alive in the distinctive, sparkling, and wonderful poems that comprise this collection.”—Eamonn Wall, author of My Aunts at Twilight Poker