Poetry review – FRAGMENTS OF AN AMERICA (VOLUME II): Charles Rammelkamp finds both warmth and urgency in these state-of-the-nation poems by Chris McNally
Fragments of an America (Volume II)
Chris McNally
Eye of the Falcon Press, 2026
$20.00, 82 pages
ISBN: 979-8-234-08942-7
Ten years after Fragments of an America Volume One, published the year Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, Chris McNally has published Fragments of an America Volume Two, reflecting on the same turmoil, dysfunction and division in which the United States remains. But he also declares his continued aspiration, the enduring hope beneath the mayhem. Along the way, mixing up the personal with the political, he expresses his own exuberant point of view, full of gratitude for this life. As he notes in the opening poem, “Poetry”:
I write for old manners
And the curious mind
For respect
And the listening few
For the ribald
And the sad
For the flag
And for the land
For those who serve God
Without skipping man
Or claiming to know
His mind
In the poem, “Eyesight,” he writes with a Whitmanesque fervor,
To be alive is success
And sincerity the coin
To pay the debt for the race
From his Introduction on through poems like “Liz Cheney’s Horse” and “Reflections on Unity 2017,” McNally sings the idealism of Martin Luther King and other slain heroes, from Abraham Lincoln to RFK Sr, and he implicitly and explicitly condemns the traitors and the insurrectionists. In “Never Lie to a Sleeping Dog” McNally writes:
It’s writ in books of old
To everything there is a season
And in every land a tale is told
Of the dog whose name is treason
The German hound once woke
As did the Confederate mutt of yore
And justice only restored its yoke
After long and bloody war
Sure sounds like January 6 to me. Indeed, the poem, “A Reexamination of Exodus 7:3 in the Trumpist Fever,” a poem that takes the line about hardening Pharaoh’s heart as its inspiration, concludes prophetically:
When that churlish red hat sea
Will be parted for all eternity
By the train they call Tenacity
And make our story
This time’s proper glory
In “Reflections on Unity 2017” McNally celebrates democracy and the freedoms it promises. The poem begins with the question, who thought up the name of the nation, “United States of America”?
Was “Out of many, one” an elegant turn
To upgrade into Latin and stick on flags and money?
He goes on to recount the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Civil Rights protests of the 1960s and to recall protests ‘from Plymouth to Wounded Knee,’ a reference to the despicable, unjust treatment of Native Americans,.
Singing not of human surfaces
Singing not in lockstep mindsets,
Singing not of uniformity
Singing the common strand
McNally also extols the underlying motivation behind these various uprisings:
No, the blazing prospect of Freedom
Was their navigable star
Freedom to speak
Freedom to plow
Freedom to lay on your back
And watch the clouds meander
Past the seeded tip of grass
Bobbing in your teeth
Freedom to pray, or not pray
But this is not to say – despite the Whitmanesque zeal – that Chris McNally can be pigeonholed as some sort of one-note patriotic writer. True, he writes with an urgency about what he calls ‘this wounded / Cornered wild animal / Of a country’ (in the long poem, “Good Apple”); but like a balladeer of old, he writes about love and folklore as well as historical events, and McNally’s voice is truly that of a balladeer, a minstrel, a singer. He tips his hand in the poem, “Country Song,” which begins:
I was halfway to the stable
When I realized with a start
I never bought a goddam horse
To put before the cart
There was nothin’ left to do
But walk to your front porch
My picture’s in the dictionary
Under Guy Who Carries a Torch
Note the apostrophe after “nothin’.” It marks the folksiness of McNally’s language throughout Fragments of an America. Note, too, the quatrains, a stanza form characteristic of ballads that he favors throughout the collection, whether it’s the ABAB rhyme of poems like “Never Lie to a Sleeping Dog,” “The Giants of Spring,” “The Tense of Love and Invention,” and the concluding poem, “Creed,” or the AABB rhymes of “The Bells of Winter” and “To the Hilt,” or the ABBA variation of “Discipline” or the non-rhyming quatrains of poems like “Time of Departure” and “In These Hours Without Sleep.”
Many of the poems, too, have this folksy wisdom likewise common to ballads, praising simplicity and a kind of moral purity, a celebration of the common good. These sentiments are found in poems like “Thus Spake Sinatra,” in which he literally gives a man the coat off his back, “Love Like This” and “The Sweetness of Life,” which ends, well, sweetly:
Let us learn forgiveness
From the twining night
We are the sunset
We walk off into
Could we ask
For more heaven
Than this
McNally can also be hilarious. For instance, in the prose piece, “Shakespeare’s Napkin,” a first-person narrative in which he encounters the Bard in a dive bar in Greenwich Village, McNally describes the manic genius sitting at the bar wearing ‘a costume, sort of tights with bunched up shorts and a linen smock.’ They talk – Shakespeare confesses he is drinking his “mortality” from the pewter cup in his hand. Soon the Bard scribbles Elizabethan verses about Nelson Mandela and Thelonius Monk on a napkin. Finishing his drink, he ‘winked at me with the amused eye of a wanderer, spun around and strode out of that joint like the first man,’ leaving the narrator a bit befuddled and confused.
Chris McNally expresses his vision best in the concluding poem, a ballad appropriately titled “Creed,” by way of letting us know his personal agenda in no uncertain terms. The poem begins with an echo of the famous song “Life Is a Carnival” by that folksy American music group, The Band:
Life is a three-ring circus
I’m the one they came to see
Ready to render anonymous justice
They’ll either boo or cheer with glee
The temperance in me advises care
But impulse says “more more more”
Meanwhile beyond the footlights’ glare
The crowd is growing bored
Till I fling my options in the air
And make them start to dance
Like angels of virtue in the devil’s lair
Is it skill or a game of chance?
More, more, more!
May 19 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Chris McNally
Poetry review – FRAGMENTS OF AN AMERICA (VOLUME II): Charles Rammelkamp finds both warmth and urgency in these state-of-the-nation poems by Chris McNally
Fragments of an America (Volume II)
Chris McNally
Eye of the Falcon Press, 2026
$20.00, 82 pages
ISBN: 979-8-234-08942-7
Ten years after Fragments of an America Volume One, published the year Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, Chris McNally has published Fragments of an America Volume Two, reflecting on the same turmoil, dysfunction and division in which the United States remains. But he also declares his continued aspiration, the enduring hope beneath the mayhem. Along the way, mixing up the personal with the political, he expresses his own exuberant point of view, full of gratitude for this life. As he notes in the opening poem, “Poetry”:
I write for old manners
And the curious mind
For respect
And the listening few
For the ribald
And the sad
For the flag
And for the land
For those who serve God
Without skipping man
Or claiming to know
His mind
In the poem, “Eyesight,” he writes with a Whitmanesque fervor,
To be alive is success
And sincerity the coin
To pay the debt for the race
From his Introduction on through poems like “Liz Cheney’s Horse” and “Reflections on Unity 2017,” McNally sings the idealism of Martin Luther King and other slain heroes, from Abraham Lincoln to RFK Sr, and he implicitly and explicitly condemns the traitors and the insurrectionists. In “Never Lie to a Sleeping Dog” McNally writes:
It’s writ in books of old
To everything there is a season
And in every land a tale is told
Of the dog whose name is treason
The German hound once woke
As did the Confederate mutt of yore
And justice only restored its yoke
After long and bloody war
Sure sounds like January 6 to me. Indeed, the poem, “A Reexamination of Exodus 7:3 in the Trumpist Fever,” a poem that takes the line about hardening Pharaoh’s heart as its inspiration, concludes prophetically:
When that churlish red hat sea
Will be parted for all eternity
By the train they call Tenacity
And make our story
This time’s proper glory
In “Reflections on Unity 2017” McNally celebrates democracy and the freedoms it promises. The poem begins with the question, who thought up the name of the nation, “United States of America”?
Was “Out of many, one” an elegant turn
To upgrade into Latin and stick on flags and money?
He goes on to recount the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Civil Rights protests of the 1960s and to recall protests ‘from Plymouth to Wounded Knee,’ a reference to the despicable, unjust treatment of Native Americans,.
Singing not of human surfaces
Singing not in lockstep mindsets,
Singing not of uniformity
Singing the common strand
McNally also extols the underlying motivation behind these various uprisings:
No, the blazing prospect of Freedom
Was their navigable star
Freedom to speak
Freedom to plow
Freedom to lay on your back
And watch the clouds meander
Past the seeded tip of grass
Bobbing in your teeth
Freedom to pray, or not pray
But this is not to say – despite the Whitmanesque zeal – that Chris McNally can be pigeonholed as some sort of one-note patriotic writer. True, he writes with an urgency about what he calls ‘this wounded / Cornered wild animal / Of a country’ (in the long poem, “Good Apple”); but like a balladeer of old, he writes about love and folklore as well as historical events, and McNally’s voice is truly that of a balladeer, a minstrel, a singer. He tips his hand in the poem, “Country Song,” which begins:
I was halfway to the stable
When I realized with a start
I never bought a goddam horse
To put before the cart
There was nothin’ left to do
But walk to your front porch
My picture’s in the dictionary
Under Guy Who Carries a Torch
Note the apostrophe after “nothin’.” It marks the folksiness of McNally’s language throughout Fragments of an America. Note, too, the quatrains, a stanza form characteristic of ballads that he favors throughout the collection, whether it’s the ABAB rhyme of poems like “Never Lie to a Sleeping Dog,” “The Giants of Spring,” “The Tense of Love and Invention,” and the concluding poem, “Creed,” or the AABB rhymes of “The Bells of Winter” and “To the Hilt,” or the ABBA variation of “Discipline” or the non-rhyming quatrains of poems like “Time of Departure” and “In These Hours Without Sleep.”
Many of the poems, too, have this folksy wisdom likewise common to ballads, praising simplicity and a kind of moral purity, a celebration of the common good. These sentiments are found in poems like “Thus Spake Sinatra,” in which he literally gives a man the coat off his back, “Love Like This” and “The Sweetness of Life,” which ends, well, sweetly:
Let us learn forgiveness
From the twining night
We are the sunset
We walk off into
Could we ask
For more heaven
Than this
McNally can also be hilarious. For instance, in the prose piece, “Shakespeare’s Napkin,” a first-person narrative in which he encounters the Bard in a dive bar in Greenwich Village, McNally describes the manic genius sitting at the bar wearing ‘a costume, sort of tights with bunched up shorts and a linen smock.’ They talk – Shakespeare confesses he is drinking his “mortality” from the pewter cup in his hand. Soon the Bard scribbles Elizabethan verses about Nelson Mandela and Thelonius Monk on a napkin. Finishing his drink, he ‘winked at me with the amused eye of a wanderer, spun around and strode out of that joint like the first man,’ leaving the narrator a bit befuddled and confused.
Chris McNally expresses his vision best in the concluding poem, a ballad appropriately titled “Creed,” by way of letting us know his personal agenda in no uncertain terms. The poem begins with an echo of the famous song “Life Is a Carnival” by that folksy American music group, The Band:
Life is a three-ring circus
I’m the one they came to see
Ready to render anonymous justice
They’ll either boo or cheer with glee
The temperance in me advises care
But impulse says “more more more”
Meanwhile beyond the footlights’ glare
The crowd is growing bored
Till I fling my options in the air
And make them start to dance
Like angels of virtue in the devil’s lair
Is it skill or a game of chance?
More, more, more!