Fiercely passionate and deeply elegiac, Richard McCann's Ghost Letters chronicles the intersection of grief and desire. These are poems of memory, but they are made of the body--the consoling body; the wounded body; the sexual body, both loved and unloved.
"In one of her spirit-letters, Emily Dickinson writes, 'I a phantom, to you a phantom, rehearse the story.' Richard McCann's Ghost Letters are posted from our moment's most laden and poignant territory, the zone where mortality and desire intersect. These poems have as much courage as they do craft; the result is an indelible book which illuminates the way the living and the dead sustain an intimate conversation which death changes but cannot silence. This ferociously tender poet instructs us that to be fully alive is to be entirely haunted." --
Mark Doty"Richard McCann blazes, mourns, and sings himself into the only eternity we've got: these words, this page, and the way you looked, beloved, that night turning away. Ghost Letters touches us in a way that feels like forever." --
Carole Maso. . . In this forceful first collection of poems by Richard McCann, whose eery title, Ghost Letters, establishes a communication between this realm and the netherworld, the dead are indeed restored to their physical bodies. . .
Many of the most satisfying poems in this collection, which received both the 1994 Beatrice Hawley Award and the 1993 Capricorn Poetry Award, thus confront with an unflinching eye the devastation wrought by AIDS. At once mournful and intensely erotic, full of astonishment at the steadfastly witnessed collision of sexual desire with undeniable mortality, the poems create a portal for the passing of souls; to stand in the circle of their music is to perform along with them a kind of blessing and valediction. . .
The reader, in turn, is grateful for what McCann takes from the world, and what through the same alchemical process he returns to it: burned away is all the bitterness, and in its place the reader discovers the unexpected softness and delicacy of ashes. Since they are ghost letters, in truth they can never be so destroyed, even as they consume themselves in their blazing energy. Richard McCann has written a moving missive to all of us, one which relates its terrible news with quiet grace, great conviction and, in the end, inextinguishable pleasure. -- Excerpted from Rafael Campo, Ploughshares, Spring 1995
