Christine H. Boldt

Life List

Arts & Literature

“McCann’s volume of new and selected poems, Life List, begins by taking readers on a trip to an almost-forgotten world of a childhood seventy years ago. The first poems reference such memory ticklers as bathing caps, jelly glasses, a child slung over a parent’s shoulder being called ‘a sack of potatoes,’ and the bright wax lips that were sold in candy stores as a Halloween disguise. We watch as the child of the early poems matures and steps out into the world with ever an eye toward the tactile, the contradictory, the urgent, and the ordinary, all of which she has recorded and generously shares with her readers. Later poems look back with new insight and appreciation for the life she has lived. The book is an invitation to each reader to give thought to his or her life through the prism of the author’s reflections on her own.”