This Blue

by Maureen N. McLane

Overview

National Book Award finalist

A vital, exhilarating new collection of poems from the National Book Critics Circle nominee

From lichens to malls to merchant republics, it's "another day in this here cosmos," in Maureen N. McLane's stunning third poetry collection, This Blue. Here are songs for and of a new century, poems both archaic and wholly now. In the middle of life, stationed in our common "Terran Life," the poet conjures urban pigeons, Adirondack mountains, Genoa, Andalucía, Belfast, Parma; here is a world sounded out, broken, possibly shareable, newly named: "Take it up Old Adam- / everyday the world exists / to be named." This Blue is a searching and a singing-intricate, sexy, smart.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374275938
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/01/2014
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.67(w) x 8.47(h) x 0.67(d)

About the Author

Maureen N. McLane is the author of two collections of poetry, Same Life (FSG, 2008) and World Enough (FSG, 2010). Her book My Poets (FSG, 2012), a hybrid of memoir and criticism, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography.

Editorial Reviews

Calling [McLane] a nature poet would be inaccurate, and unfairly limiting, but many of the poems in her new collection…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…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…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?)…McLane is a poet of control. While the world in her viewfinder seems to be wobbling on its axis…McLane renders each phrase with the precise and steady hand of an ice sculptor.

The New York Times Book Review - Jeff Gordinier

04/28/2014
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 rosé’s a rosé’s a rosé.” 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.)

Publishers Weekly

These are poems that keep you on your toes . . . McLane renders each phrase with the precise and steady hand of an ice sculptor. Her consummate finesse can be a source of delight.” —Jeff Gordinier, The New York Times Book Review

“*Starred Review* "The 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 . . . An exciting collection that celebrates the extraordinary in the ordinary.” —Doris Lynch, Library Journal

“Beginning with "a chair,/ a table, grass," and ending in the "wild way" of the woods, McLane's latest poetry collection 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.” —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

★ 02/01/2014
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

Library Journal