The Necessary Going On

Selected from his sixteen poetry collections, published between 1980 and 2025, the poems in The Necessary Going On by Gary Fincke demonstrates that "No one plumbs mystery's dark like Gary Fincke, no one does bracing tenderness like Gary Fincke, and no one tends the house of memory with more rigor and insight than Gary Fincke." (Catherine Pierce) As stated by former Delaware Poet Laureate, Fleda Brown, "If I were to locate a center of gravity in this new collection it would be the delicate, loving, study of what it means to be a man, a husband, a father, a witness to the damages the world inflicts." That "understanding and confronting that 'what we are is temporary,' this gathering of work written over forty years demonstrates again and again Finke's insistence on faith in the tremulous connections among us and how, despite the violence of this age, of any age, we go on 'to sing our songs of endurance.'" (Michael Waters)