World Enough: Poems
Starred Review. McLane is a professor of English at NYU, a prolific book critic and specialist in British romanticism. Her academic proclivities are readily apparent in her second collection: what is called thinking/ is obsessing she writes, echoing and answering the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. This book has the overall feel of a poetic diary, with meditations on the changing seasons, travel, politics, love affairs, and the mind itself, as McLane (Same Life) ventures to understand, via various methods, what it means to live in a particular epoch: The question/ is the ratio of the palpable hurt/ to the general session/ of life in an era. There, and elsewhere, McLane crosses the streams of academic and accessibly passionate language, creating a kind of emotional, autobiographical criticism in hip free verse: rain rain and the trees/ engulfed I am tired/ of reading Russians their suffering/ souls their tribulations. McLane, armed with a sharp wit, engages in an ambitious poetic project, as she confronts the very meaning of the shadowed hours of time past, present, and future.(June)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.