Book Review: “World Enough” by Maureen N. McLane

Maureen N. McLane is an accomplished writer, poet, critic and teacher.  Yet it is because she is so accomplished that I expected more from her latest book, “World Enough”. 

I decided to review her book the same way I decide to review any book of poetry.  I picked it up off the shelf, opened it to a random page and gave it three chances to speak to me.  I read,

 “watch the clouds / on any given day / even they don’t keep their shape … 
… sociable shifters / bringing weather from elsewhere / until it’s our weather / and we say now it’s raining here”

… and I was sold. 

I began to have second thoughts when I read the first poem, “Roundel.”  Though well executed within its form, I thought it a poor choice as an opener to engage the reader, and certainly not representative of the poetry that follows throughout the book.  Some of the next few poems seem to struggle for direction, some seeming to change their subject completely in the last couple of lines as if unhappy with all the previous lines.  Some of the rhymes seemed a little too playful, as if there for their own sake at the expense of meaning.  One or two of the longer works made me wish that they were shorter. 

Later in the book, however, there began to be poems with phrases that might make you jerk your head around to have a closer look, really make you want to “lunge” for some “seventeenth century tufts of historical lust.”  Little gems like “Poussin”, McLane’s celebrated borrowing from “Antigone” in her work, “What A Wonder Is Man”, and fun poems like “Anthropology”.  There are glimpses of McLane’s innermost.  There are many good poems that leave the reader with a chill, a ponder, a thrill or a smile. 

I think the main problem with “World Enough” is the order in which things occur.  After reading a few of the stronger poems therein, I went back and read some of the weaker works with a kinder eye.  If section III had been moved up front, for example, I would have been much less put off by some of the more rambling, less focused poems that occur earlier in the book.  My verdict is that a disinterested critical eye could have turned what is a good book of poetry into a much better book of poetry. 

“World Enough” by Maureen N. McLane, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Copyright 2010