Some Say: Poems

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.