Reviewed by Anne Graue

Poets love writing about trains. From Whitman and Dickinson to Olds and Levertov, the lure of the train and all of its possibilities is intense and overpowering as a subject for poetry. Its rhythm invites reflection and incites verse. Compounded with the idea of humans who have never met being thrown together for brief interludes from the rest of their daily lives, the call to the poet is strong. In her most recent collection, Tracks, Lynn McGee joins the ranks of these poets who have produced verse inspired by trains. In writing about her own rides in and around New York City, she shares insights both philosophical and ephemeral and in all ways compelling. 

At rush hour on the A train,
we take our music straight,
tiny fist of plastic jammed
deep in the ear,
chords rippling back to caverns
where memory flares.

I catch songs in a jar at night
and sip their light
in the locked cell
of my commute.
Everyone around me,
does the same.

These stanzas from "Headphones at Rush Hour" expose what so many of us know if we have ever commuted by train in a big city. Each person is remote and simultaneously part of a community of travelers, a panoply of folks on their way, who seem strange and familiar, friendly, or sometimes fearsome. McGee's poems recognize the possibilities that trains provide for noticing ourselves in others while we examine the transient thoughts that emanate from a close, fleeting proximity with strangers. These are poems that illuminate and dance through memory.

Trains are masterful at invoking memory and are suitable for brooding or wandering through time. What emerges in a commuter's mind is unpredictable and at times startling, or at least bewildering. In the collection's opening poem, "Jackpot," the speaker notices the view inside as well as outside of the train and tells herself, "That could have been you, that staunch face. / You could have been that man whose backpack / smacks her and a few other riders, / as he pivots toward the door—" The poem introduces the speaker as "a person who leaves the train and stops at a fruit stand," a person who notices and considers her surroundings, making images and encounters relevant to her own beliefs and values.

In the first two sections of the collection, memory holds the speaker captive in some instances. The act of riding on a train becomes the act of remembering. In a pivotal poem, "Jupiter and Chapparal," the speaker shares an image of her sister "taking in beauty on her last day, / clouds soaked with pink and field electric, / silver crackling across its face." This sudden move away from the commuting experience is purposefully jarring. Surrounded by poems that denote an exhaustion in the speaker after readings or during rush hour, the poem displaces the reader with a jolt—much like the lurch of a train—and infuses the other poems in the collection with a significance beyond an appreciation of travel by rail to a deeper wonder at the ways in which people navigate the complex tragedies of life.

Although the first two sections hold a stronger recurring thematic thread (about a sister's death), in the third and final section of Tracks, McGee focuses occasionally on the joy that can be found in a subway ride through New York City's boroughs. There is a sense of peace and community in "Walking to the Train at Sunrise," and a shared metaphor when the speaker says, "we sway with the trains' hard turns." This truth harkens back to the poem on the previous page, a 9/11 memorial, with an acknowledged passage of time that sometimes disappears when memory of that day rears up, in this case through a communal choir in the subway "crooning a staple of street musicians" that concedes the shared feeling that "Yesterday came suddenly." The tone is mournful and yet there is some expectation of hope. There is also a sense that grief can be counted on to surprise us at any time. 

Tracks is a collection of observational interludes. In its narratives that contain powerful imagery and refined metaphors, it includes all the characters and memories that make up the speaker's philosophy of life. The poems clarify the hours spent traveling between destinations and celebrate the varied travelers she encounters, from kids and strangers to musicians and friends. McGee gives us joy and sorrow in eloquent multitudes that unswervingly demonstrate that "Life evaporates and rains / back down, / rains back down."