Same Life

by Maureen N. McLane

From the alphabet inscribed in our DNA to the stars that once told stories, Same Life maps a cosmos both intricate and vast. In her first full-length book of poems, Maureen N. McLane has written a beautifully sensual and moving work, full of passion and sadness and humor and understanding. Erotically charged lyrics conjure a latter-day Sappho; major sequences explore citizenship and sexuality, landscape and history, moving us from Etruscan ruins to video porn, ushering us through cities, gardens, lakefronts, and airplanes. Here are poems equally alert to shifts in weather and cracks in consciousness; here is a poet equally at home with delicate song and vivid polemic. Same Life evokes an American life in transit, shareable yet singular; singable, ponderable, erotic; an unpredictable venture in twenty-first-century soul-making.

Genres: Poetry

109 pages, Hardcover

First published September 2, 2008

Reviews

[Sean]

Dog-eared:
"the special stasis of august"
"saratoga"
"envoi"

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

With a voice discretely public and sufficiently "notational," frankly charming and perfectly brusque, more curious than accelerated, Maureen N. McLane's first book pays debts to her intellectual heroes (Sontag) and poetic persons of the poem (Moore, Bishop, Duncan, O'Hara, Howe). "What we have," she writes in the critical book, on romanticism and the discursive networks of humanism, written concurrently with this volume, "is a situation in which the elite practitioners of a culturally prestigious art [she's writing here about Shelley and Wordsworth] intuited a massive discursive challenge." McLane's lyricism is pitched to just such a challenge.

[John Tessitore · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best thing about McLane's poetry--and there are many great things--is that it wants to participate in our lives. It takes on the big themes: love, sex, art, social inequality, political hypocrisy, etc.. And it knows its formal and historical contexts. But it is not weighted down by these things. It carries them the way all carry them, sometimes heavily, sometimes lightly, most of the time with wry resignation and a lingering sense that existence can be pleasurable after all. It declares itself, and that is why it speaks to us. If it showed any hesitation at all, it would fall back into the lukewarm oatmeal of American poetry. Instead, it snaps, crackles and pops.

[Michael Lindgren · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maureen McLane is both a highly-regarded critic and a member-in-training of the Boston school of contemporary poetry, whose writers tend toward the colloquial, let's-have-little-bohemian-epiphanies-about-painting school of O'Hara/manque verse. Her line is spare and measured, but not really jarring or weighty enough to distinguish itself from the many others working the same terrain. Great-looking cover, though.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was recommended very warmly by a friend who lent me her copy, which she bought as soon as it came out, having read one of the McLane's poems in The New Yorker. It's not bad, a high two stars I guess. There were a couple of poems I liked quite a bit, but more often I felt the nagging "so what." At $24, I was glad I hadn't bought this myself.