I -- Roundel -- They Were Always Thinking -- Premise -- Chesapeake Bay -- Passage I -- L.A. -- Passage II -- Song of the Last Meeting -- II -- Songs of a Season II -- Haunt -- Saratoga August -- III -- Douce Dame -- Spring Daybook -- Palais Royal -- Other Worlds -- Jardin du Luxembourg -- Poussin -- Au Revoir -- What a Wonder Is Man -- Life Study -- Jacaranda -- Natural History/Jardin des Plantes -- Flaneuse -- Saint-Sulpice -- Rue Bonaparte -- Songs of the South -- IV -- Plot (Mount Auburn Cemetery) -- Contact -- Transcendentalism -- After Sean Scully -- So Long -- It's Not That -- Anthropology -- Pilgrimage -- V -- Meditation/Central Park -- Fuckwind -- Moonrise Lake Champlain -- Lunar Maria -- Late October -- Passage III -- Envoi.
Summary
""Reading Maureen N. McLane's Same Life is like discovering Francois Truffaut's first films: this is an exhilarating, brilliant poet...[and] a thrilling first book."---Frank Bidart" ""Do not read this book if you do not want to feel anything. Whether you've had one love or many or none, you will identify with some part of this experience. If you are a poet, you will identify with the impossibility and necessity of putting it on the page."---Kascha Semonovitch, The Kenyon Review" ""The dance of the mind, and the language adorning it, is intricate, bold, and precisely enacted through every line of Maureen N. McLane's Same Life. A thoroughly exhilarating, and significant, debut."---August Kleinzahler" ""A dazzling poetry collection."---Elizabeth Taylor, Chicago Tribune" ""Same Life is such a tour de force that it's hard to believe it's Maureen N. McLane's first collection ... It takes a combination of hubris and humility to write variations on Sappho, and McLane has both in Àfter Sappho,' a series of poems that is equal parts translation, adulation and transformation ... McLane's got a razorsharp and snarky sense of humor, too, and a deft hand at love poems."---Kel Munger, Sacramento News and Review" "In World Enough, Maureen N. McLane maps a universe of feeling and thought via skyscapes, city strolls, lunar vistas, and passages through environments given and built. These poems explore how we come to know ourselves---sensually, intellectually, politically, biologically, historically, and anthropologically. Moving from the most delicate address to the broadest salutation. World Enough takes us from New England to New York to France to the moon. McLane fuses song and critique, giving us poetry as "musical thought," in Carlyle's phrase. Shuttling between idyll and disaster, between old forms and open experiments, these are restless, probing, exacting poems that aim to take the measure of---and to give a measure for---where we are. McLane moves through many forms and creates her own, invoking the French Revolution alongside convolutions of the heart and revolutions of the moon. Shifting effortlessly between the species and the self, between the sentient surround and the peculiar pulse within, World Enough attests to experience both singular and shared: "not that I was alive / but that we were.""--BOOK JACKET.
