Robert McNamara is the author of Second Messengers (poems), and the translator of Birajmohan and Other Poems, by the contemporary Bengali poet Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyay. He teaches at the University of Washington.

Books by Robert McNamara: The Body & the Day

About The Body & The Day:

"The Body & the Day is one of the most lucid and fully realized books of poems I have read. The marvelous physical detail and meditative clarity remain in perfect balance through poem after poem and the language is fresh, uncluttered, and totally unpretentious. Those who know Robert McNamara's work will rejoice in this new collection; anyone else who reads it will rejoice right along with them."
—Christopher Howell

"Robert McNamara's new collection The Body & the Day is a lyric narrative meditation on how the mind engages with and becomes the world, and the world in turn becomes mind-how, in the inevitable passage of time, ever more illusory as it passes, poetry becomes both testimony and 'eulogy to the memory of moving and being moved.' Here are recollections of early love, of married love, of friendship and of cultural and philosophical differences discovered, examined, and ultimately accepted. There are several lyrical sequences, enriched with mythological allusions, including the title series with its rain-imbued imagery of the Pacific Northwest, apt for the reflective quality of the collection as a whole. My favorite is a witty sestina that recapitulates the bawdy pathos of the form's troubadour origins and its latter-day ironic and obsessive bounds. In the illumination-bent day of McNamara's poetry, 'the body does what it knows,' the spirit enters into the 'deep and momentary/we unsayable' as bird song; and the mind, though at times 'distracted from itself,' understands that 'silver shimmering/on black water' is a representative figure for the syncretistic impulse that unifies all the disparate elements of the narrative particular. Readers' minds, the other half of the body of this poetry, will listen with the poet for its transparent music."
—Carolyne Wright