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.
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.
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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: | 9781466875074 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 156 KB |
About the Author
Maureen N. McLane's books of poems include More Anon, Some Say, Mz N: the serial, and the 2014 National Book Award finalist This Blue. Her book My Poets, a hybrid of memoir and criticism, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She lives in New York.
Read an Excerpt
This Blue
By Maureen N. McLane
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2014 Maureen N. McLaneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7507-4
CHAPTER 1
A SITUATION
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.
Here's a chair,
a table, grass.
A cricket hums
my Japanese name.
Skyscrapers
are stars. Rocks.
Those were swell,
seasons. So strange,
that heaven, that hell.
WHAT I'M LOOKING FOR
What I'm looking for
is an unmarked door
we'll walk through
and there: whatever
we'd wished for
beyond the door.
What I'm looking for
is a golden bowl
carefully repaired
a complete world sealed
along cracked lines.
What I'm looking for
may not be there.
What you're looking for
may not be me.
I'm listening for
the return of that sound
I heard in the woods
just now, that silvery sound
that seemed to call
not only to me.
AVIARY
Curmudgeon
pigeon,
iridescence
glinting unlike
granite,
what common
gullet did you peck
that crumb down now
you jerking thing
some call a flying
rat? Rats will inherit
the earth's garbage
dump and you
may also flash
on that trashheap
called the future
untransformed.
Yet to the dove
you're kin.
If my love
could sing
like a mourning
dove, could ring
the wrongs
away in the wind ...
Kind bird,
do what's yours
to do with every
scrap forgot —
the nightingale's
not more precious
than your idiot
insistence to stick
around and peck and look.
OK FERN
OK fern
I'm your apprentice
I can now tell you
apart from your
darker sister ferns
whose intricate ridges
overlay your more
regular triangled fans.
Tell me what to do
with my life.
BEST LAID
it's clear
the wind
won't let up
and a swim's out —
what you planned
is scotched.
forget the calls,
errands at the mall —
yr resolve's
superfluous
as a clitoris.
how miraculous
the gratuitous —
spandrels,
cathedrals.
on a sea
of necessity
let's float
wholly
unnecessary
& call
that free
LATE HOUR
isn't it time
to say the garden
is wasted
on us? untended
roses the japanese
beetles gone
apeshit the labor
theory of value
will not redeem
the labor required
to reclaim
this. do I recommend
nothing?
I don't know
what to say
and go on
saying it
ALL GOOD
a "beautiful day"
nothing happened
and nothing was going to happen
the wind shook leaves
that did not fall
the moored boat did not sail
& the rain fell
on casual grass
everything was full
including the empty glass
* * *
a "beautiful rose"
no sign of a woman
but a boy's succulent anus
in a Persian lyric
call it ranunculus
or camellia
are they not more enfolded
than the folded rose
whose folds your nose
now probes
* * *
the mountain's
promiscuous
any cloud can take him
any sun have him
it's all good
today's assent
and tomorrow's
ANOTHER DAY IN THIS HERE COSMOS
Stormthreat. Clouddarkened
mountain, computer
unplugged. Commuters
to nature on a plain
of grass the sheep
munch clear of clover.
A park's a way to keep
what's gone enclosed forever.
Rhyme is cheap.
So is pop.
Easy to be obese
in a land fat with rape.
Now the sun burns
unprotected skin.
Now the sheep dream
of lanolin.
To everything alive
we're kin.
Eat or be eaten —
what the vegan
spurns and the Jain.
I saved a fly
I baptized William Blake
and released to the sky.
Of course he'll die.
The new grasses
a brighter green
than the older spears
make this a scene
of summer starring
black butterflies. The Faerie
Queene alights from her magic car
a red convertible
and she a glam tranny.
The sheep don't care.
The sheep don't mind.
In three months the wind
will blow these trees bare
but for the tall pines
littering the forest floor
with browning needles
gone soft in the slow trample
of small creatures and long rain.
A park's a way to keep
what's gone enclosed forever.
SUMMER BEER WITH ENDANGERED GLACIER
My one eye
does not match
the other
Corrective
lenses regulate
whatever
needs require.
Seeing?
I was being
being seen.
Let be
be finale.
Let our virtues
tally
up against
the obvious.
If we
don't believe
ourselves
custodial
why all
the hoobla-
hoo, hulla-
balloo?
Passivist
mon semblable
ma soeur
soi-même
blow through
this blue
WHAT'S THE MATTER
Why the low mood,
the picking at food?
Maybe it's the weather.
Maybe it's hormones.
Explanation's cheap
but sometimes hits the mark.
I am the target
of mysterious arrows
I myself let sling.
O that's your fantasy
of omnipotence.
You make everything
your thing.
All day I stayed in bed.
It seemed someone else
must have been alive
have done what I did.
Failed to do
what I failed to.
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
as Dante says the hillsides
can go white
in the middle of a new life.
INCARNATION
Some are gay
in an old way.
It has its charms.
The kids are like
hey ... wassup ...
except they don't say
wassup. Hey.
The women with children
who are nonetheless
virgins. Mrs Dalloway.
The body a nest
of sockets
and unplugged cords.
The body without
organs has finally arrived
its wireless folds
almost tangible.
Years ago
I wanted to die
when you made me feel
we were fungible,
everything repeatable.
Later I floated
like a spirit
in a spirit photograph
above my life.
I shared a skin
with my skin.
I was in
my life not of.
I hovered above.
Then I descended
a millennial reincarnation
surprising myself
out of that ghost.
Carnations grow
in sandy soil.
You can touch
them. Hey.
TELL US WHAT HAPPENED AFTER WE LEFT
Ferns here ferns there
I dream of my newest friends
who will soon subside
into near strangers
— peculiar the sudden
intimacies evanesced
without a kiss ...
Who went home
with whom after the dance
party's what we want
to know. What century
did seduction
end in? Libertines
linger in the corridors
of the purely sexual.
I pulled you up
by my bootstraps
& liked it. I licked
you up & down
& up. I poached
eggs on your breasts
and combed yr curls.
There was nothing
I wouldn't do
with you & to.
Let's go down
to the river none
returns from. O yes
you swift diver
you plunge good.
THAT MAN
That man over there
looking sidelong
as you sidelong
smile I do not think
he's a god
or frankly that great
but it's true he's glowing
under your eyes &
obliterating
the sun that moments ago
was shining on this bench
where we sit across
from him now
flaring terrible
as I think of your
many rendezvous
I desire death &
I almost shove back
in my throat the call
to the Perseids calling them
down now to shower
him dead in their shower
EVEN THOSE
Even the places
the sun doesn't reach
in the deepest woods
are hot. Even the places
that never dry — the mosses
creeping everywhere
a damp carpet underfoot —
are dry. Even the quietest
places you've never been
are disquieted by your cry.
Even those places.
LUNCH WITH MOUNTAIN
The moss I ate
revised my esophagus
into a symbiotic system
any lichen could live in.
I ate too much
you sd last night
I could drown
from this beer
I can't finish.
Give me that stick
to shove down
my throat.
Give me your bow
your arrow
of burning burning
throated green.
THEY WERE NOT KIDDING IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY
They were not kidding
when they said they were blinded
by a vision of love.
It was not just a manner
of speaking or feeling
though it's hard to say
how the dead
really felt harder
even than knowing the living.
You are so opaque
to me your brief moments
of apparent transparency
seem fraudulent windows
in a Brutalist structure
everyone admires.
The effort your life
requires exhausts me.
I am not kidding.
MORNING VANITAS
Weeding
the moss
a local
boy tends
the folly
the new gardener
created on the patio —
a loose
quilt of greens
the weeds' greens
are seen
to violate.
Every day
something
to exclude
to survive.
I cut
you out
of this
my life.
MORNING WITH ADIRONDACK CHAIR
The woods are winds.
The rush of your mind
plays against a rustle
you could almost pitch.
Clouds a moment's
monument disperse
into an ever whiter sky.
Today you could be
anyone. A dragonfly
soars high above the grass
infested with annoying
flying beetles, bee-like
things made to sting.
You live your whole life
backward the green
chair always placed
there on the lawn
you long to flee.
Here it is —
another lawn
become a field
become a meadow
hedged with trees.
Why not sit forever
in a weathered chair named
for Indians you'll never
meet? Why the stand
of poplars marking the edge
of the town you arrive
at in dreams surprising
you back to the drugstore
the traintracks the road
out of town and also
back to its nuclear
bicycled streets?
Memory is boring
but as measure.
Everything is boring
unless it replaces time.
Music was making
me crazy
for a permanent
song nothing ever
unshaped I come
when you touch me
like that or like
that when you
move me into
an unforeseen
chair in your
exploding heart
GLACIAL ERRATIC
Boulders flung everywhere
signs of the glacier god
marking the path you can't take.
"I am in Brooklyn
but not of Brooklyn."
"Do you have an avidity
for the new?"
Some violence
is very slow
until it makes itself felt.
Makes you feel it.
"I need to write
good fast music.
All my good music
is slow."
How should a person be?
"I am happy
to be contemporary."
"I am glad I will die
before all this prevails."
In child pose
you breathe through the back.
Then there's the rest,
all those positions
you flow or stumble through
until that rock. That specific rock.
ROAD / HERE NOW
I think of you here
because I thought of you here
before. Otherwise
I never think of you
except on a summer drive
that echoes the drive
I took the day after
I heard you died
except when I see
the red skirt
I wore that day
the day you finally
kissed me
a red skirt
I now see
only in pictures
from a long-ago trip
to the Pyrenees
the skirt I wore
to your party
In the middle of the party
here's death
is what I thought
when we saw our friend
lying on the bare road
by her smashed bike
She's alive
in the Berkshires.
So many are alive!
More are dead.
Strange thing
to survive to discover
you will live
till one day it's over
no more to discover
no more rounding back
to this ongoing living
avoiding till you don't
that specific rock
TODAY'S COMEDY
Why Dante in summer?
Why not? The doctrine
of purgatory's no more strange
than nanotubes or Tang.
I used to know
its ins and outs.
What we've abandoned grows
higher than trashheaps
in Naples. My love
canal's clean and my heart
in my breast
is right dressed.
No guide led me here
but Virgil and everyone
I ever met, in woods
books dreams in suburbs
the city the farm.
Marcus Aurelius
took a page
from the town mouse
and his country cousin.
The lesson of fables
is mutable, their structure
not. Something
must change. A hero
must range in a land
he also unwittingly
charts. If many die
not everyone can.
Odysseus must reach
if not Ithaca
a farther shore
and the little zygotic blip
you once were
must enter the world
& its pure gore.
MEZZO
To choose
not to translate
heaven
paradiso
not so heavy
so let it be
& let there be
a Golfo Paradiso
sailed slowly through
the day you arrived
at the place the names
made their way to your ears
* * *
did all this fall
into the lap of the world
protozoa pulsing
upward from the slime
complicating themselves
into a sentience
you'd recognize
* * *
the quilted greens
an eye ascends
the terraced steep
attests the hands
and feet of men
who raised the sail
& crushed the grape
* * *
Apennines scraped
but for a few pines —
man or sheep or time
the denuder,
stripper of scrub,
flayer of rock —
* * *
that stone over there
whitestreaked outcrop clawed
by perpetual waves
it too thinks
a stone's stoniness
* * *
here it is ever
mild and the faces
show it gently
lined different
from the way
a less temperate clime
will incise you
* * *
below my neck
a faint network
the mirror reveals
in the morning
* * *
nel mezzo del cammin
I was caught
in a glass net
what did the glass weave
GENOA
The merchant republics are done
as is the nun
who forbade us aged five to say
we were done.
The oven door opened
in her mime
the door to the oven
where we were thoroughly roasted
and done.
If you are done
that means I can stick
a fork in you. You
she corrected
are finished.
Finished
with all that some days
it seems a dream
the long boredom
in the schoolroom
workbook assignments
rushed through straining
toward what weird
consummation?
Sister Lucretia —
she was another one
terrifying the children who braved
the zenana of nuns
pledged to Christ and torture
of the wayward souls who ventured
into the sanctum sanctorum
the private apartment of six nuns
for a weekly piano lesson.
Bach had twenty children
she declared. Her heart was given
to a Texan — Van Cliburn.
A wimpled nun
one of the last
thus to dress among the remaining Franciscan
sisters. Excess
daughters in immigrant families
ready to give some
aid and comfort to the Lord
or the local monsignor —
a special vocation —
were they rotting away
in their habits, were they
the transfigured ones?
I wanted once
to become one.
Those days are done
and I am almost done
almost historical as a usuried ship
heading west and more west
to find treasures
for kings. Look in thy heart
it is a treasury
it was said
Mary said.
She was another one.
Even now at the Brignole station
we see flocks of nuns
rope-belted, a crucifix flying in wind.
A veiled woman
might become another woman
under a different sun.
Even here the sisters
have become Indian, Ethiopian,
no extra Italian
daughters to pay the godly sum
of glorious renunciation.
The Turks are threatening Christendom
in old chronicles
and today's European bulletin.
Beware of falling under the thumb
of Islam.
It will never be finished
said the Caliph
to the Sultan.
It is almost done
this meal where I stick
a fork in tomatoed squid stew
called burrida its Arabic origins
brining my tongue.
I stick a fork in an animal
fork in a soul
and I eat and I eat
until kingdom come.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from This Blue by Maureen N. McLane. Copyright © 2014 Maureen N. McLane. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
TITLE PAGE,COPYRIGHT NOTICE,
EPIGRAPHS,
I,
A SITUATION,
WHAT I'M LOOKING FOR,
AVIARY,
OK FERN,
BEST LAID,
LATE HOUR,
ALL GOOD,
ANOTHER DAY IN THIS HERE COSMOS,
SUMMER BEER WITH ENDANGERED GLACIER,
II,
WHAT'S THE MATTER,
INCARNATION,
TELL US WHAT HAPPENED AFTER WE LEFT,
THAT MAN,
EVEN THOSE,
LUNCH WITH MOUNTAIN,
THEY WERE NOT KIDDING IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY,
MORNING VANITAS,
MORNING WITH ADIRONDACK CHAIR,
GLACIAL ERRATIC,
ROAD / HERE NOW,
III,
TODAY'S COMEDY,
MEZZO,
GENOA,
SAN FRUTTUOSO GLOBAL,
DRINK WITH MOUNTAIN, REMEMBERED, ANDALUCÍAN,
INSCRIPTION,
TO ONE IN PARMA,
LEVANTO,
IV,
TERRAN LIFE,
EMBROIDERED EARTH,
ICE PEOPLE, SUN PEOPLE,
BELFAST,
DEBATABLE LAND,
THINGS OF AUGUST,
REPLAY / REPEAT,
BROADBAND,
WESTERN,
V,
HOROSCOPE,
MOSS LAKE,
SKYWATCH,
QUIET CAR,
SONG,
HER SUMMERMINDEDNESS,
LOCAL HABITATION,
THE FACT OF A MEADOW,
MÄRCHEN,
ELSEWHERE,
ENOUGH WITH THE SWAN SONG,
ENVOI,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
ALSO BY MAUREEN N. McLANE,
COPYRIGHT,