Some Say

June 26, 2017
Simultaneously exhausted by the conventions of nature poetry and energized by nature’s mutability, McLane (Mz N: The Serial) adopts a stance in her latest collection that could seem pessimistic were it not for her desire to keep moving. Several poems take on the subject of the sun, that perennial poetic inspiration. “It’s not cool/ to be enthusiastic” about the sun, McLane writes, but quickly sheds any anxiety about that coolness: “Let’s go to the morning/ and watch the sun smudge// every bankrupt idea/ of nature.” Her speaker often laments not experiencing nature-induced sublimity. “OK you heard the coyotes/ and I didn’t,” she writes, “You can hear/ the highway even here.” As human influence pervades all but the most remote wilds, forms of technology are “canceling all the noise/ my earthened ears bring me.” An obsession with the passage of time, and the inevitability of the individual ending, also threads through the collection. Airplanes, for instance, are “Metal wombs/ for earthly angels” that carry within them “the future dead.” There’s conspiratorial humor, too: “Talking to birches/ I am an idiot// & I know you get it/ reader.” McLane seeks after truth, but not one single version of it. “Why should I feel bad/ about beauty?” McLane asks—these poems definitely do not.

Starred review from March 15, 2017

The imagistic touchstones of McLane's fifth collection (after MzN: the serial)--the sun, night skies, trees--may be familiar poetic staples, but the poet is keen to "unknow" them, to see nature anew and follow wherever the reperception leads: "Let's go to Dawn School/ and learn again to begin." Set down in spare, flowing strands unhampered by punctuation, these poems achieve a surprising complexity, like unraveled Mobius strips of logic and epiphany: "The multiverse contracts/ to a single implacable place/ where nothing you can imagine/ will never not take place." While mindful experience of the physical world is a prerequisite for metaphysical knowledge ("A long walk/ required to know/ the ground"), divine presence, here considered a form of nostalgia, is not ("sweet to think/ it's all designed"). McLane's knack for encapsulating discovery and loss in so few words ("It is never not time/ to say hello/ or goodbye") is all too rare, not least because of the knowing humor and delicacy ("The fall/ suspends itself in the trees") that run through them. VERDICT Highly recommended.--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2017
In her latest collection, National Book Award finalist McLane (This Blue, 2014) documents the sheer work of living. Here there is a constant struggle to define the intangible, an exploration of the control that comes with knowledge: Everything in the world / has a name / if you know it. Simultaneously, McLane presents an awareness of how little we do know ( There you go / making images / because you don't know the names ) as she questions both religion and science and describes the wonder inherent in both. Inevitably, she portrays the coupling of sex and death, assesses the bigness of human smallness, and, ultimately, follows the sun. Today I am keeping faith with the sky, she says, and the sun is constant: it is a thinning sun, that old sun, the glorious sun, and, finally, an eclipse. There is a continual sense of movement, and life, in McLane's poems, and this collection is certainly an uphill, if enjoyably challenging climb: I'm not going anywhere / fast but where / we're all going. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)