Award-winning Maine poet Wesley McNair reads from a collection of his early poems during Thursday’s Great Falls Forum at the Lepage Conference Center in Lewiston. With an intuitive sense of detail and a sharp wit, McNair’s works reveal both the oddity and beauty in everyday life. Focusing on topics from a Grange Hall meeting to a night on the road, each of the poems he read celebrates small-town Maine, where nothing happens “unless you have the eyes to see it,” McNair said.

More than 60 people attended the forum, including struggling writers, poetry buffs and graduates of the University of Maine at Farmington, where McNair taught until his retirement. The crowd applauded so enthusiastically at the end of each reading that McNair joked, “I think I’m going to stay here forever, just so you can clap at me.”