Exploring the interplay of personal and collective experience, Maureen N. McLane's poetry traverses diverse landscapes, from New England to the moon. The collection delves into self-discovery through various lenses—sensual, intellectual, and historical—while blending song and critique. With a mix of traditional and experimental forms, the poems reflect on themes of revolution and connection, capturing the essence of both individual and communal existence. McLane's work resonates with a profound sense of place and emotion, inviting readers to contemplate their own realities.
This Companion offers a comprehensive overview and interpretation of Romantic
poetry in its literary and historical contexts. Attention is given to the work
of less well-known or recently rediscovered authors, alongside some of the
greatest poets in the English language: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Scott,
Burns, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Clare.
National Book Award finalist Maureen N. McLane stuns with a precise, perceptive book of poetic meditations. In her first book of poems since the scintillating More Anon: Selected Poems, Maureen N. McLane offers a bravura, trenchant sounding out of inner and outer weathers. What You Want is a book of core landscapes, mindscapes, and shifting moods. Meditative, lyrical, alert to seasons and pressures on our shared life, McLane registers and shapes an ambient unease. Whether skying with John Constable or walking on wintry paths in our precarious republic, the poet channels what Wordsworth called “moods of my own mind” while she scans for our common horizon. Here are poems filled with gulls and harbors, blinking red lights and empty lobster traps, beach roses and rumored sharks, eels and crows, wind turbines and superhighways. From Sappho to the Luminist painter Fitz Henry Lane, from constellations to microplastics, What You Want is a book alive to the cosmos as well as to our moment, with its many vexations and intermittent illuminations. In poems of powerful command and delicate invitation, moving from swift notations to powerfully sustained sequences, this collection sees McLane testing what (if anything) might “outlast the coming heat.” And meanwhile, “There’s no end / to beauty and shit.”
At times loose-limbed, freewheeling and chatty, at times tautly musical, and often miraculously both at once, Maureen N. McLane's poetry has been described as having 'a tonal register somewhere between teenage fangirl and Wordsworth professor' (LRB). What I'm Looking Forgathers selections from her first five books of poetry, from the mixture of love poems and breezy skewerings of Great Literature that characterize her debut, Same Life, to the later collections' shadowing of a mind roaming wittily through nature, history, music and sex, and the bravura life-story-in-episodes of Mz N- the serial.Brainy, funny, passionate, uncool and always utterly charming, these 'sexy, cerebral and romantic' poems (The New York Times Book Review) will make you 'laugh, cry and think in quick succession, or all at once' (Sarah Howe).
"This new collection from the acclaimed poet and critic Maureen McLane works in an innovative register of essayistic writing: conversable yet grounded in scholarship, close-readerly but far-seeing. McLane's encounters with poems and modellings of poetry illuminate her own poetics and suggest more generally all that poetics can encompass. With characteristic brilliance, McLane pursues a number of open questions: How do poems shape our condition and conditioning as sentient creatures? How do they generate modes for thinking? How does rhyme help us measure out thought? What is the relation of poetry to its surround--to the environment--and how do specific poems activate that relation? What is the difference between a poetry of "finding" rather than of inspiration? And how should we understand poetries invested in "the notational" and others committed to "projects" (as many contemporary poets are, as Wordsworth was in his Prelude)? As these questions suggest, My Poetics does not offer a brief for or against a position on poetry. Instead, its artful arrangement of readings and divagations (and even, occasionally, verse) show us a way to be with poems and poetics"--
More than any other period of British literature, Romanticism is strongly identified with a single genre. Romantic poetry has been one of the most enduring, best loved, most widely read and most frequently studied genres for two centuries and remains no less so today. This Companion offers a comprehensive overview and interpretation of the poetry of the period in its literary and historical contexts. The essays consider its metrical, formal, and linguistic features; its relation to history; its influence on other genres; its reflections of empire and nationalism, both within and outside the British Isles; and the various implications of oral transmission and the rapid expansion of print culture and mass readership. Attention is given to the work of less well-known or recently rediscovered authors, alongside the achievements of some of the greatest poets in the English language: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Scott, Burns, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Clare.
