Böcker av Maureen N. McLane

Acclaimed poet and critic Maureen N. McLane offers an experimental work of criticism ranging across Romantic and contemporary poetry. In My Poetics, Maureen N. McLane writes as a poet, critic, theorist, and scholar--but above all as an impassioned reader. Written in an innovative, conversable style, McLane's essays illuminate her own poetics and suggest more generally all that poetics can encompass. Ranging widely from romantic-era odes and hymns to anonymous ballads to haikus and haibuns to modernist and contemporary poetries in English, My Poetics explores poems as speculative instruments and as ways of registering our very sense of being alive. McLane pursues a number of open questions: How do poems generate modes for thinking? How does rhyme help us measure out thought? What is the relation of poetry to its surroundings, and how do specific poems activate that relation? If, as Wallace Stevens wrote, "poetry is the scholar's art," My Poetics flies under a slightly different banner: study and criticism are also the poet's art. Punctuated with McLane's poems and drawing variously on Hannah Arendt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Roland Barthes, Bruno Latour, and other writers and poets, My Poetics is a formally as well as intellectually adventurous work. Its artful arrangement of readings and divagations shows us a way to be with poems and poetics.

'McLane is a Romantic poet out of time' Ange Mlinko'Passionate, erudite, sensuous . . . McLane probes the minutest currents of human feeling' Sarah Howe'My favourite living poet . . . [her work] bristles with life, feeling, argument' Parul SeghalThe witty, searching new collection by National Book Award finalist Maureen N. McLane, musing on the sea, ageing, love and the climate crisisIn her first book of poems since What I'm Looking For: Selected Poems 2005-2017, Maureen N. McLane offers a bravura collection of perceptive poetic meditations. What You Want is a book of landscapes, mindscapes, and shifting moods. Here are poems filled with gulls and harbours, blinking red lights and empty lobster traps, beach roses and rumoured sharks, eels and crows, wind turbines and superhighways. Sensitive, lyrical, alert to seasons and pressures on our shared life, McLane registers and gives form to an ambient unease. From Sappho to Constable, from constellations to microplastics, What You Want is a collection as alive to the cosmos as it is to our moment. This is McLane's cloudy-sky book: a voyage through lambent autumns and shining winters, in which an eye looks out on what it longs for, what it loves, and asks: will it survive the coming heat?

Maureen N. McLane was raised in upstate New York before gaining degrees from Harvard University, the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of Chicago. Her books of poetry are Same Life (2008), World Enough (2010), This Blue (2014), Mz N: the serial (2016) and Some Say (2017). My Poets, a hybrid of memoir and criticism, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. McLane is Professor of English at New York University.

From the alphabet inscribed in our DNA to the stars that once told stories, Same Life maps a cosmos both intricate and vast. In her first full-length book of poems, Maureen N. McLane has written a beautifully sensual and moving work, full of passion and sadness and humor and understanding. Erotically charged lyrics conjure a latter-day Sappho; major sequences explore citizenship and sexuality, landscape and history, moving us from Etruscan ruins to video porn, ushering us through cities, gardens, lakefronts, and airplanes. Here are poems equally alert to shifts in weather and cracks in consciousness; here is a poet equally at home with delicate song and vivid polemic. Same Life evokes an American life in transit, shareable yet singular; singable, ponderable, erotic; an unpredictable venture in twenty-first-century soul-making.