From one life-into another, James Scannell McCormick writes and asks, Aren’t words a verge, a crossing over, / a crossing above, like a ferry’s? In his beautifully structured and rendered poems, McCormick invites you to cross over into a kind of world, into a double of this world. First of Pisces opens with poems capturing the beauty and grace of place, clear-eyed enough to acknowledge the slop and bluster of winter as well as a quiet window of drifts, of a raw / day’s blue bones of ice. In one sequence of twelve stunning sonnets he masterfully crafts form and music into separate jewels, worlds where a shadowy mare dreams a gift of Jonagolds and roses bend / with weight of rotting hips, a world with four Orthodox Jews swimming at Nice, naked and whole, and another where we gaze with the bakers and street-sweepers at sundogs above Stockholm in air grainy with ice crystals. McCormick suggests we imagine the North Star made all of steel. Yes. Let’s do that. And let’s imagine a book that will seduce you, transport you, send you flying from here to there. Look, that book is in your hands. Open it. Cross over.Marion Starling Boyer, author of The Sea Was Never Far
The poems in this collection are clearly the result of forging meticulous attention to the world - its flora and fauna, people, art-into exquisite poetry. McCormick’s lines are like the lovingly executed brushstrokes of an accomplished painter. Of special note are the several persona poems, bringing the reader some unsung celebrities like hat muse Isabella Blow and Alice Liddell, Lewis Carroll’s real-life Alice. The Piano Pieces for Dogs literally sing on the page.
Bonnie Flaig Prinsen, author of Brothers in the Water
James Scannell McCormick’s First of Pisces leaves so much joy in the mouth after reading-a full tin of music, poems packed neatly like so much raw sustenance for the ear. With poems that have defied riptide and hanging rain, McCormick’s deft linework and vocabulary, often tightly and impressively formal, lay bare a world and a voice darkening with life still crisp on the prairie’s mad/bordering, the bleakness of its flat ache. I’m going to be singing these lines in my sleep-I don’t want them to leave me.
Josh Roark, editor of Frontier Poetry
