Review by New York Times Review
I KNOW A SONGWRITER who hates nature poetry. Just about every other style of verse speaks to this guy, whether it's traditional or avant-garde, unabashedly romantic or abstractedly cerebral, but as soon as my friend hears about silvery, moonlit branches swooshing in some mountain breeze, or raindrops mystically anointing a spray of spring wildflowers, he wants to gag. It isn't nature he objects to, of course. What grates on him is an all-too-easy portrayal of the natural world as a cartoon Eden - a dainty, defanged, sentimentalized landscape that seems to exist for no other reason than to teach people nice lessons. In "My Poets," a bracing book from 2012 in which she deftly fused memoir and literary criticism, Maureen N. McLane appeared likely to agree with him. There, she stingingly described the "dreadful" work that often issues forth from the quasi-pastoral pitfall: "forced engagement with nature, revolting rhetorical performances of the pathetic fallacy (I feel for you! You, Nature, Feel for and with Me!)." So when McLane herself writes a poem about, say, strolling through a meadow, it's only natural, so to speak, that the end result is bound to be a very different experience. Calling her a nature poet would be inaccurate, and unfairly limiting, but many of the poems in her new collection, "This Blue," enter into a fresh engagement with what she refers to as the "embroidered earth." If they qualify as nature poems, then they are nature poems for this moment in which nature itself appears to be going haywire, primarily at the hands of those of us who have a knack for messing it up. Wander into the sylvan glade with McLane and you might find yourself recalling the rule Larry David reportedly insisted on when he and Jerry Seinfeld were creating "Seinfeld": "No hugging, no learning." Underlying much of "This Blue" is a sense of a world that's cracked and cracking. Consider the title of one poem: "Summer Beer With Endangered Glacier." Or consider "Song," in which she writes: "Love's in Gloucester/where the whalers once sailed/and the cod's collapsed." In "Lunch With Mountain," the narrator's communion with a clump of flora appears to have backfired. "The moss I ate/revised my esophagus/into a symbiotic system/any lichen could live in./I ate too much/you sd fast night." And when she's writing about a rosebud in "All Good," McLane drops an anatomical metaphor unsettling enough to make you think twice the next time you lean in for a fragrant whiff at the florist's. This is not the literary equivalent of Ambien - comforting verse meant to ship you off to dreamland. These are poems that keep you on your toes, and McLane makes you aware of that right from the start. The book gets rolling with "A Situation," whose opening stanzas evoke the destabilizations of climates in flux: Everything bending elsewhere, summer longer, winter mud & the maples escaping for norther zones... Take it up Old Adam - every day the world exists to be named. Page after page, the tone of "This Blue" might be described as elegant unease. You may feel, at first, as if you're strolling out onto a welcoming, sunlit summer porch, but after a few stanzas you're starting to wonder whether Philip Larkin, James Wright and Emily Dickinson have pulled up Adirondack chairs next to you for some prickly, moody chitchat. (And is that Frederick Seidel coming through the screen door with a tray of cocktails?) "They Were Not Kidding in the Fourteenth Century" wins you over right away - with that kicky title, of course, and then with a gambit that suggests there could be openhearted sweetness to come: "They were not kidding/when they said they were blinded/by a vision of love." But within a few beats the poem has revealed its bitterness - and has abruptly turned on whomever it's addressed to. It stops with a slap: "The effort your life/requires exhausts me./I am not kidding." McLANE IS A poet of control. While the world in her viewfinder seems to be wobbling on its axis - "The sky's shifted/and Capricorns abandon/themselves to a Sagittarian/line" - McLane renders each phrase with the precise and steady hand of an ice sculptor. Her consummate finesse can be a source of delight, at least for the reader who's not expecting easy sledding, and as I kept revisiting "This Blue" I found myself wishing someone would hire Tilda Swinton to record the whole thing as an audiobook. Lines like "Now the sun burns/unprotected skin" and "The merchant republics are done" are tailormade for Swinton's chillingly smart, slightly imperious, drips-from-an-icicle delivery. Yet McLane, like Swinton, can be most effective when she lets her guard down, perhaps because she does it so sparingly. Residents of the Eastern Seaboard with a fondness for rail travel will find it difficult not to be smitten with "Quiet Car," a hushed lullaby in which the narrator waits for a lover making the trip to Boston by train. No, meadows and forests don't provide much of a refuge for human beings in "This Blue," but that quiet car? The one chamber of the train set aside for people who don't want to talk and don't want to have to listen to other people talking? Well, that's where you might find a moment of peace. Just as long as you don't expect to get it from a plant. In "OK Fern," the speaker has a little fun with the whole idea of pastoral poetry, and strikes up a very short conversation with, yes, a fern. She asks it a question: "Tell me what to do/with my life." The poem ends there. It's pretty clear no answer will be forthcoming. JEFF GORDINIER is a reporter for The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 13, 2014]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Beginning in a garden with "a chair,/ a table, grass," and ending in the "wild way" of the woods, McLane's latest poetry collection (after World Enough) is a progressive push into the unknown. Her consistency of voice, an amalgam of neoformal rhyme and contemporary bravado, serves as an anchor throughout the book's five sections, each of which explores a new setting and subject pairing. These spare, slender poems guide us through the domestic garden landscape where "it's all good/ today's assent/ and tomorrow's" to the rocky terrain of mid-life, where "It's still in my head/ those things I did/ and said and cared for// doing but it's all gone/ white like green hills/ in certain light." McLane's mixture of the high and low can also be found is also evident when she exclaims, "O brave New World/ your fruits have gone incognito!/ A rose's a rose's a rose." In the latter third of the collection McLane briefly tackles the technologies that have become a part of our cultural evolution, lamenting "the sludge/ the open connection/ will carry," but coming to terms with how "I was nostalgic/ until I got over it." Still, in the final section, poems like "Horoscope" and "Skywatch" look heavenward for answers, and find them "unrelieved/ except tonight/ by this light." (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This third poetry collection from McLane (Same Life; World Enough) is replete with searching poems-"how can I be in this world?"-and poems celebrating nature and travel. McLane possesses an eye for the specific details of a place-"scant pines/ stagger the apennines/ semaphoring"-and can dig deeper to capture both its beauty and its political history: "the snowdrops ungeared for fighting/ yet strive they do to live in this suddenly/ coldened place." McLane's style is usually very spare: "a young mother/ & a posse of teens/ newly gelato'd pass by." She often composes in tercets or quatrains, and unlike many modern poets she occasionally incorporates rhyme, though not always to good effect: "It's good not to be dead/ -a thing one wouldn't have said." Humor is a plus in many of her titles: "Morning Vanitas," "They Were Not Kidding in the Fourteenth Century," and "Enough with the Swan Song." The longest poem at five pages, "Terran Life" has many good sections, but the best poems reveal a sense of play while at the same time making every word count: "So there/ said the spring. So what/ the jay shrieked." -VERDICT An exciting collection that celebrates the extraordinary in the ordinary: "I've left words/ in woods the thrushes/ sing in refusing/ the extinction/ of the day." [See "What's Coming for National Poetry Month in April," Prepub Alert, 11/13/13.]-Doris Lynch, -Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
