Some Say
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A dazzling collection of poems exploring the mental landscape of our moment
Maureen N. McLane’s Some Say revolves around a dazzling “old sun.” Here are poems on sex and death; here are poems testing the “bankrupt idea / of nature.” Some Say offers an erotics of attention; a mind roaming, registering, and intermittently blocked; a mortal poet going “nowhere fast but where / we’re all going.” From smartphones to dead gods to the beloved’s body, Some Say charts “the weather of an old day / suckerpunched” into the now.
Following on her bravura Mz N: the serial: A Poem-in-Episodes, McLane bends lyric to the torque of our moment—and of any moment under the given sun. Some Say encompasses full-barreled odes and austere lines, whiplashing discourse and minimal notations. In her fifth book of poems, McLane continues her “songs of a season” even as she responds to new vibrations—political, geological, transpersonal, trans-specific. Moving through forests and cities, up mountains, across oceans, toward a common interior, she sounds out the ecological mesh of the animate and inanimate. These are poems that make tracks in our “unmarked dark” as the poet explores “a cosmos full / of people and black holes.” From its troubled, exhilarated dawns to its scanned night sky, Some Say is both a furthering and a summation by a poet scouring and singing the world “full // as it always was / of wings / of meaning and nothing.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.