Maureen N. McLane: What You Want. Poems

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 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.”

Maureen N. McLane is a poet, memoirist, critic, and educator. She has published eight books of poetry, including This Blue, Finalist for the National Book Award, and Some Say, Finalist for the Audre Lorde/Publishing Triangle Award and for The Believer Award in Poetry. She is also the author of an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism, My Poets, a New York Times Notable Book. Other works include two monographs on British romantic poetics and numerous essays on romantic-era and contemporary literature and culture. Her poems have been translated into Italian, French, Greek, Spanish, and Czech and have recently appeared in the London Review of Books, Poesia, The New York Review of Books, and The Yale Review. Her essays have appeared in the LRB, The New York Times Book Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. Her latest book is What You Want: poems, just out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Penguin UK.

What You Want.
Poem
by Maureen N. McLane
Publisher: ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2 mei 2023)
Language: English
128 pages
ISBN-10‎ 0374607257
ISBN-13‎ 978-0374607258
Hardcover
$27.00

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