Some Say: Poems

By Maureen N. McLane

A dazzling collection of poems exploring the mental landscape of our moment

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.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jul 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9780374714802

Maureen N. McLane

Maureen N. McLane's books of poems include More Anon, Some Say, Mz N: the serial, and the 2014 National Book Award finalist This Blue. Her book My Poets, a hybrid of memoir and criticism, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She lives in New York.

Book preview

I

As I was saying, the sun

& the moon and all stars

you can name

are fantastic!

It’s not cool

to be enthusiastic

not chill

to say hey!

There’s a fucking sun

still shining

over every goddam thing

except what happens at night!

—& even when we don’t see it

it’s there the sun

like god

but more palpable

less responsible

though both burn.

A turning world

is flat

until mountains

and valleys and axes

tilt the models

men make. If I say abstract

I don’t mean ideal

I mean real.

The lids of our eyes

are fewer than cats’.

Watch it bear down on us

brute beautiful fact

and what stuns

is a sun stuck in the sky

by no one.

OK Let’s Go

Let’s go to Dawn School

and learn again to begin

oh something different

from repetition

Let’s go to the morning

and watch the sun smudge

every bankrupt idea

of nature "you can’t write about

anymore" said my friend

the photographer "except

as science"

Let’s enroll ourselves

in the school of the sky

where knowing

how to know

and unknow is everything

we’ll come to know

under what they once