The poems I like best in this book are the ones that deal with places, maybe because these poems are full of satisfying specificity: Vermont and its lake and gulls, Saratoga in summer rain, L.A. with its oleander and “Hockney blue” pools and, perhaps my favorite poems of all, the ones about Paris in the third section of the book—poems like “Jardin du Luxembourg” or poems like “Palais Royal” with its “bankers on lunchbreak\/and grandmas with children” soaking up the sun by the fountain. <\/p>\n
McLane also plays quite a bit with rhyme and sound and metre, and I can’t quite get excited about her style in some of these poems: “iTunes\/Indiana dunes” as a couplet falls flat for me, and many of the more rhyme-y of her poems feel similarly offputting. But some of what she does with poetic form is interesting, and sometimes really great. The book’s first poem, “Roundel,” had me running to my bookshelf to look up roundels in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics<\/em>: from that book I learned that this form, introduced by Swinburne, is a variant of the French rondeau, and by looking at the rhyme schemes I could see that McLane plays in her poem<\/a> with both Swinburne’s form and the French one. The repetition of words and phrases beyond just the refrain also is interesting, and I like the way McLane changes possessives to plurals to give things a slant, “the sea’s” vs. “the seas.” More exciting to me is a longer poem called “Songs of a Season II,” which is made up of a series of triolets (which I wouldn’t have known had I not read this interview<\/a> with McLane). The ever-helpful New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics<\/em> explains that the triolet is a “French fixed form composed of eight lines and using only two rhymes, disposed in the following scheme: ABaAabAB (a capital letter indicates a repeated line).” I like the form lots, the repetition and rhyme of it, and McLane does some great things with it, like this:<\/p>\n \nTo want to be awake The poems I like best in this book are the ones that deal with places, maybe because these poems are full of satisfying specificity: Vermont and its lake and gulls, Saratoga in summer rain, L.A. with its oleander and “Hockney blue” pools and, perhaps my favorite poems of all, the ones about Paris in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2609\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nEvery hour, to miss nothing
\nOf the changeable air, the lake.
\nTo want to be awake
\nIn the light and starred dark—
\nEvery instant another thing
\nTo want. To be awake
\nEvery hour. To miss nothing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"