Maureen McLane. Photo courtesy of Joanna Eldredge Morrissey.

Maureen McLane’s poetry is deceptively good-natured. It draws you in with its smooth, meditative rhythms and genial mood only to veer into hidden channels of ambivalence, cynicism, acute sadness, and occasional hostility. Reading McLane is like having a conversation with an old friend and being suddenly reminded that she has whole continents of experience you’ll never visit, judgments (including against you) you’ll never hear, and difficulties in which you’ll never share. In that sense, her work is an ongoing investigation of subjectivity: it plays with voice and tone, perspective, and persona to create an emotional world that is at once intimately recognizable and treacherous, strange. Always in dialogue with a richly conceived literary history—and with figures like Dickinson, O’Hara, the Romantics, and especially Sappho—the poems speak of a human nature at once less variable and more dynamic than we might have guessed, especially when it comes to the vagaries of desire both erotic and intellectual.

With the release of More Anon, a collection of poems from her first five books of poetry, McLane takes us on a sort of tour of her world, a well-ordered place where things (metrical forms, marriages) nonetheless go frequently awry. Her restless lyricism travels through bedrooms and classrooms, forest paths and quiet cars, searching, perhaps, for a stillness that doesn’t feel like paralysis, and never quite finding it. I spoke to McLane over email about her relationship to genre, “rhetorical IEDs,” and what it means to write in a queer poetic tradition. Her responses were generous, learned, and—like her poetry and her own criticism, of which she’s produced several books, including the acclaimed literary memoir My Poets—evidence of an omnivorous sensibility that finds almost everything interesting and takes nothing for granted.  Read More