In 2006, the poet and critic Victor D. Infante wrote about McCarthy in OC Weekly, saying "The small details of quiet, desperate lives get glossed over in the heavy traffic of media, the sweat and exhaustion of everyday labor lost in inhuman terms like 'rightsizing' and obscenities of massive unemployment being seen as irrelevant to an 'improving economy.' Daily, it seems less and less like there's any value placed on everyday life. McCarthy looks at that and still finds something beautiful; his affections are not just reserved for the glaringly lovely, but for what gets left behind in the face of such dazzle. 'The first robin of spring/is like the clicking of a tumbler/in some marvelously complex lock," he writes. "But there's never anything about/the last robin of fall/that announces it/as last.'