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Just like youto registerat the trailheadforget to check outon departurewho are youtesting you there foreverwalking unlostunfound on the mountaintrail to Rock Pond& if the searchersshould go forthshould they snowshoetwenty further milesinto the woods and trailsof Fern Park where youO idiot yesterdaytoday and tomorrowpenciled yourself intothe logbook and theretoo forgot to check out—attenuated dreamof immortality inscribedin pencil fadingslow in the coldmonths then the warmerasable youthe partial marksillegible incompletionyour best badgeIn one of the vibratinguniverses you and thedeer walk silenton the same hill,you on the tracka town employeemade in snow, yes the stateand its impersonal lovinglesser offices, the deerwherever the deer wishesand can step
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- July 1, 2023
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“Register” from WHAT YOU WANT: POEMS by Maureen N. McLane.
Copyright © 2023 Maureen N. McLane.
Used/Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All Rights Reserved.
Joanna Eldredge Morrissey
Maureen N. McLane is a poet, memoirist, critic, and educator. She has published eight books of poetry, including This Blue, Finalist for the National Book Award, and Some Say, Finalist for the Audre Lorde/Publishing Triangle Award and for The Believer Award in Poetry. She is also the author of an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism, My Poets, a New York Times Notable Book. Other works include two monographs on British romantic poetics and numerous essays on romantic-era and contemporary literature and culture. Her poems have been translated into Italian, French, Greek, Spanish, and Czech and have recently appeared in the London Review of Books, Poesia, The New York Review of Books, and The Yale Review. Her essays have appeared in the LRB, The New York Times Book Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. Her latest book is What You Want: poems, just out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Penguin UK.
National Book Award finalist Maureen N. McLane stuns with a precise, perceptive book of poetic meditations.
In her first book of poems since the scintillating More Anon: Selected Poems, Maureen N. McLane offers a bravura, trenchant sounding out of inner and outer weathers. What You Want is a book of core landscapes, mindscapes, and shifting moods. Meditative, lyrical, alert to seasons and pressures on our shared life, McLane registers and shapes an ambient unease. Whether skying with John Constable or walking on wintry paths in our precarious republic, the poet channels what Wordsworth called “moods of my own mind” while she scans for our common horizon.
"[McLane] pushes on the boundaries of selfhood in her enlightening offering . . . With humor and insight, this points the way toward a more humane and expansive understanding."
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
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