This Blue
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 ros 's a ros 's a ros ." 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."
