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This Blue

Poems

Maureen N. McLane

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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ISBN10: 0374535191
ISBN13: 9780374535193

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128 Pages

$14.00

CA$15.99

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A National Book Award Finalist

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.

Reviews

Praise for This Blue

"McLane's is a sly poetry, to be sure—part silk dress, part canvas sneaker, and in some sense, all reversible raincoat. I find myself wanting to see the world the way McLane does, to gaze out through her speaker's curious—in every sense of the word—eyes. This is the way I feel about all artists I admire . . . McLane is a poet of enormous appetites. Her heart is healthy, her perceptions robust, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the long poem, 'Terrain Life.'"—Julie Marie Wade, Lambda Literary Review

"These are poems that keep you on your toes . . . McLane renders each phrase with the precise and steady hand of an ice sculptor. Her consummate finesse can be a source of delight." —Jeff Gordinier, The New York Times Book Review

"Beginning with 'a chair,/ a table, grass,' and ending in the 'wild way' of the woods, McLane's latest poetry collection 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." Publishers Weekly

"The third poetry collection from McLane is replete with searching poems—'how can I be in this world?'—and poems celebrating nature and travel . . . An exciting collection that celebrates the extraordinary in the ordinary." —Doris Lynch, Library Journal (starred review)

Reviews from Goodreads

About the author

Maureen N. McLane

Maureen N. McLane is the author of two collections of poetry, Same Life (FSG, 2008) and World Enough (FSG, 2010). Her book My Poets (FSG, 2012), a hybrid of memoir and criticism, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography.

Joanna Eldredge Morrissey

Maureen N. McLane at The Poetry Foundation