Appointed Rounds

by Michael McFee

Michael McFee's new book takes its title from the unofficial motto of the US Postal "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." All of us have appointed rounds in our lives--essential things we are given to do and must try to complete, whatever the inner or outer weather, whenever the time of day or night, however we may approach those duties. This lively and wide-ranging collection of fifty essays--many of them pointed, a page or so, in the playful manner of Robert Francis and THE SATIRICAL ROGUE ON POETRY, and others rolling on for much longer--addresses McFee's appointed rounds, subjects he has been thinking and caring about for books, his native Western North Carolina mountains, writing, reading, editing, teaching, and, as the title suggests, the daily mail. It includes pieces on "My Inner Hillbilly" and Appalachia, on "Authors' Photos" and "Blurbs" and other parts of the physical book, on "My New Yorker" and contemporary literary culture, on "Poets as Novelists" and "Marginalia" and being a writer, on a teacher's "Gradebook" and "The Blackboard," and on authorial matters like "Voice," "Audience," and "Immortality." The prose explorations in APPOINTED ROUNDS, like McFee's poems, are meant as appreciations, paying close attention to things that have mattered to him (and many others), savoring their details while exploring their larger design, and saving his versions of them even as they may change or fade or disappear altogether.

Genres: Nonfiction

222 pages, Paperback

Published February 1, 2018

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

McFee is a poet and a professor of English at UNC-Chapel Hill. He has been a writer for decades, and these essays represent his detailed musings near the end of a distinguished career.

McFee includes some sentimental paeans to blackboards, letter-writing, and the reading of actual physical books. All of the essays here are invariably warm and personal and give a glimpse of the life of a writer as he counts his steps to the mailbox and back each day.

The book bogs down here and there in mind-numbing detail; I found it tough slogging to get through his description of each physical part of a book at the beginning of this collection. But I did learn a few things even from that essay, and I certainly gained some appreciation for the author's eye for detail and his love of language.

[Tom Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. I really found the essays incredibly personal and found it hard to put the book down. Each section of short essays was so very different. I was grabbed from the start when the author spends the first 12 essays talking about books. When he followed this up with a series that begins with "My Inner Hillbilly" I was hooked. I encourage anyone who has never read a book of essays to give this one a try. You may find yourself looking for other books of collected essays.