Take it up Old Adam - Everyday the world exists To be named
We are all continuously seeking out our place in the cosmos, and if we all stepped back and rTake it up Old Adam - Everyday the world exists To be named
We are all continuously seeking out our place in the cosmos, and if we all stepped back and recognized that each person we met was also looking to understand themselves and their place in the world perhaps we would be more kind to one another. 'How can I be in this world?' asks Maureen N. McLane in her collection of poetry This Blue, a collection rife with searching for serenity in a modern world we all share. While much of the poetry seems to tip towards being written from the brain and not the heart, it never feels cold and the evidence of being born from academia is actually quite charming. From looking back at the past for clues and looking about our own existence of a high speed internet world, McLane delivers beautiful investigations and elegies of our human condition.
Moss Lake I eat this silence like bread.
The white lake replaces my head.
I am cold and calm as the untracked snows.
McLane plays it safe across her newest collection, though in a way this works to her advantage. Shock-value seems strangely to have incorporated itself into a lot of recent poetry and feels ten years too late; who is the target audience as most readers of poetry feel comfortable in an open artistic field, and if something unabashedly open or vulgar or sexual shocks you in the modern world than which rock have you been living under? McLane just wants to create something beautiful, and I respect the hell out of that. There is a calm sereneness to her imagery that combines both the digital age with the natural elements. Mountains and moss are recurring motifs that remind us of the basic elements of existence when we strip away the commercialization and social posturing of our lives, yet still retains a joyful poking at our human ways.
the mountain's promiscuous any cloud can take him any sun have him it's all good today's assent and tomorrow's
That said, McLane uses moss metaphors so often that one wonders if she was out of inspiration or had originally titled this collection This Moss.
While her metaphors are always fresh and lively, there does seem an effort to pack as many as possible into a poem. Occasionally her work feels like a rock opera with a stack of amps and a full orchestra when all that the audience came for was a solo acoustic show. This Blue tends to write from the intellect and not the heart, which leads to a slight tainted feeling of contrivance instead of poetry like a weightless rose that grew from the concrete, pure and untouchable as a puffy white cloud (mixing metaphors might be a pretentious joke about packing metaphors, or I might just be a tasteless writer). Though many of the elements of academia present in this collection are some of the high points. McLane often toys with rhyme schemes ever so slightly—rhyming poems are something I typically am adverse to, yet here they work—or uses refrains at the end of her stanzas that work in a fantastic lyrical sense. McLane keeps her style fresh and her freshness stylized in a way that is quite charming. One element I enjoyed was the removal of vowels from key words—'said' being written as 'sd', for example—that tie a ribbon of individuality around the collection. Punctuation is also oddly placed, breaking certain lines up strangely or refusing to use punctuation to run two sentences together that read in a humorous non-sequitur fashion. While the style never reaches anything groundbreaking, it seems like the seeds of something that could become brilliant. This is clearly a brilliant mind at work, and though the mind sometimes imposes on the essence of the heart, it still performs quite elegantly.
While there is much to grimace or be underwhelmed by in This Blue, McLane manages to pull off a striking work of serenity that assesses the modern condition as she takes us through 'another day in this here cosmos'. Reaching across all of time, McLane places the human heart on the page in stanza-ed glory while clearly having fun with form. This fun emits from the page into the heart of the reader, and one can't help but feel a little happier for having read them despite a tendency towards obvious contruction and overthinking. This Blue plays it safe, but has a lot of fun doing so. 3.5/5
Broadband Before I open my mind to the sludge the open connection will carry
let me tarry with archaic diction and ancient bodies the sun & my own
shaped by a code unfolding itself through millennia. For thousands of years
Art had no fashion was the beautiful drawing we did. In cave after cave...more
s.penkevich
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