Wesley McNair wrote his latest book-length narrative poem about his younger sister, Aimee, to affirm her loving spirit. He also wrote it to reclaim his story, his family’s story, and, in a larger sense, the nation’s story.

“Dwellers in the House of the Lord,” McNair’s 10th book, to be released Tuesday by Boston-based David R. Godine, is the story of love and home, filled with characters who offer hope and some who act on fear. It’s set in rural Virginia, where Aimee and her husband, Mike, have made a difficult if enduring life together. They’re still together, though living apart in an assisted living home called Magnolia Manor. She is in what McNair calls “the lockdown unit” in the final throes of Pick’s disease, an irreversible form of dementia. McNair, 78, is 13 years older than his sister. He stays in touch with Mike by phone.

Maine’s former poet laureate, McNair wrote this book for his sister – he dedicated it to her – but the story he tells is a broad, American story about immigration, cultural values and place, all embodied in smaller stories of family and home. It plays out as its own epic poem, written mostly in prose over 61 easy pages, and it works as the concluding poem in a trilogy of long narratives that McNair has written over 30 years. Each explores a moment of personal trauma that occurred as the country was going through its own crisis.

In the first of these narratives, “My Brother Running,” published in 1993, McNair’s younger brother suffers a fatal heart attack after a period of relentless, daily running. McNair linked his brother’s death to the Challenger shuttle disaster, which occurred at the time of his brother’s heart attack, and to the underside of the Reagan era and its view of American exceptionalism. In the next narrative, “Fire,” which came out in 2002, he ties a fire in his mother’s home in New Hampshire, the family home, to a broader theme of destruction that includes his family, his mother’s Ozark family and the trauma they suffered during the Dust Bowl, and the hot ruins of American wars from the Gulf War, which was happening at the time, to Vietnam and the Korea War of McNair’s boyhood.

Ultimately, “Dwellers in the House of the Lord” is also about reconciliation in the age of division, reconciliation of family and nation. “A reconciliation is the ultimate enemy of fear. When people come together, fear disappears,” McNair said by phone from his home in Mercer. “If I could tell this small, intimate story about my sister and all the ways that hope and love are tested and found right on the ground, and intersect it with this big noisy made-for-television, fear-bating Trump story, I could not only honor my sister, but I could help people to think about our politics in a deeper way, which is poetry’s way.”

The pivot in McNair’s poem, where two stories collide, is first the story of his sister, their shared New Hampshire roots and her life in Virginia, and second, the story of Trump’s rise to power, which McNair tells through Aimee and Mike and their life in Virginia.

Aimee was in her 50s when she became afflicted with Pick’s disease. McNair has watched her disappear over a decade. “It’s a heartbreaking period, and I’m still going through the end of it,” he says. “I felt this intense need to preserve her in a poem as she was, as I knew her to be. She had a lot of trouble in her life, beginning with my mother. She fell into this conflicted marriage with my brother-in-law Mike, who owned a gun shop in rural Virginia and was full of anger.”

McNair calls Aimee a soldier in the poem, with an astonishing capacity for hope and a way of picking herself up after many challenges and reaching out again, always, for unconditional love. “And in the end, that is how she brought this wonderful reconciliation to my family,” he said.

Family stories begin with place. McNair’s place has always been northern New England. Born in New Hampshire and educated in Vermont, McNair plotted an academic career across New Hampshire and Maine, settling finally in Mercer, where he remains in retirement from the University of Maine at Farmington.

By circumstance, McNair has always populated his poems with rural characters and places, and observed the world from the perspective of someone who lives willingly among trees. He uses poetry to navigate his world, and to help others make sense of it, so he writes about what he knows. “Poetry is about the hands and feet and the steps we take and the five senses that come to us as we move through the world,” he said. “I never wanted to write poems about rural America. I wanted to write about human beings, wherever they might live. I just ended up in this kind of area. But my ultimate subject has always been America.”

For “Dwellers in the House of the Lord,” McNair went into the thickets of rural Virginia, to the home of Aimee and Mike in the town of Abner, where Mike owns a gun shop. On the phone from Mercer, McNair described his sister’s homeplace as an angry place, “the belly of the beast” of Trump country, where guns and politics converge. Though similar in some ways to rural Maine, rural Virginia is very different with different truths and values, he said.

In the poem, McNair describes it like this:

Outside the back window
of Aimee’s second house
from the time they moved in,
the high, danging chains
and gambrel stick
of a deer-slaughtering station.
In the front, open all day,
Mike’s gun shop. “Obama
is going to make me rich,”
he says one night, chuckling
on the phone before handing it
to Aimee, “but I’m already
out of bullets. Everybody
down here’s out of bullets.”

Behind his chain-link fence, two dogs,
penned for life without names
so they won’t be spoiled for hunting.

Family stories are also about immigration. McNair writes about his French-speaking ancestors, who came down from Canada and made their life based on a dream that was, stated in the simplest possible terms, about love and home and finding a place where they could belong, often with the sheltering influence of relatives close by. “They all had their struggles, and they all came with a dream. We carry that dream of love and home that we inherited from the ones who came before,” he said.

Immigration stories surface in the politics of fear. McNair writes:

“The illegals are taking our jobs,” Trump says
on the campaign trail in Richmond. “They’re
taking everything, including our money.
This is not going to happen anymore.”

Build the wall, the audience chants, build the wall!
My sister Aimee does not understand politics.
All she thinks about as she starts down the road
she’s known for twenty years and sees
the Trump signs is Mike erupting at the blacks
on TV, and the hatred in the gun shop,
and the blessed lightness she feels as she sends
it all, sign by sign, into her rearview mirror.

Family is also about hope and the comfort of home. Aimee’s illness brought generations together, to Virginia. Tensions have softened.

Near the end of the poem, McNair writes about visits to her sister’s side, what she remembers and what she does not, the vacant stares and moments of joy.

Taught by experience to live in the world of in-between waiting for the moment we wish for to happen, we wouldn’t really know if she’s letting herself go a little each day to live simply by touching and holding – by love, the very thing which, without our quite knowing, she has called us to all her life, and why each one of us has come.

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