The Silent Ones

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The Silent Ones, Michael McMahon’s sweeping debut, introduces a child dwelling in a garden of shadows that wound and sustain. The Wish suggests how he ties his father’s sudden death to a grim jingle he mockingly directed at his napping father. The roots of his guilt are established in poems like Quiet Time and Holy Writ where the scowls of stern nuns in his Catholic grade school become internalized sources of shame. Juxtaposed to this guilt are poems like Headwaters and Picnic at Taughannock that celebrate blessings bestowed by family.

In Part II of The Silent Ones, forces that harm and heal flow into a natural world that mirrors and shapes the personal. Wilderness is haunted by dissonant cries of coyotes tearing through boughs of Jeffery pine throughout the night. In Raptor the poet cowers from the drumming wings of a red-tailed hawk in attack. Conversely, Camping by the Klamath celebrates mule deer osprey and damsel flies at streamside, one of the many poems in Part II that laud the natural world’s ability to grant restorative grace.

The final section, attempting to resolve these tensions, invokes powers of ancestry. Here the poems depict the loving trust of parents, grandparents, granduncles and aunts who, remembering how it was, forgive him over and over, up to and beyond their graves.