What You Want

“The old ways / of being a person have their hold / on me and I move in the wake / of baleful ships and a very few gods,” says the speaker of Maureen McLane’s What You Want, a follow-up to More Anon: Selected Poems (2022). In these new poems, McLane continues to deliver—more, anon—an intellect at play in irreverent meditations packed with sonic wit.

But also—the moon! The sky! This is a speaker who takes the long view. Nothing is sacrosanct. “After ripping out” and “personifying plants / Evil Nettle / Fascist Weed,” the poem “Weeds” moves upward, to

[…] stars doing themselves
in the sky
insouciant celebrity
assholes don’t care
why don’t they care
don’t they

Tongue in cheek, McLane addresses the human condition, both age-old and doomed to age in this world. The title poem, “Get What You Want,” which takes its name from Sappho’s fragment 58, addresses “You who, like undergraduates, are always young / go in for the lyre / do not neglect/ to put your hands in the air say WAAAAAA,” juxtaposing them against an aging speaker, for whom “the dawn breaks / upon my tender body turning / stiff, my hair from black to white—.” Ever allusive, McLane moves on to the (unnamed) goddess Eos, “the one who forgot / to ask for endless youth,” and those “immortal aging rockers” (the Rolling Stones) with “their hearts straining against deathless ribs.”

A scholar of British Romanticism—“Lyric, society / plurality, yo. / O the 90’s!”—McLane digs at our current relationship to the natural world with her assured, voice-shaping enjambments:

beauty is truth
maybe. no one’s singing

the genius of this sea
but dolphins and whales
trapped lobsters

McLane’s formal play extends in “Since You Asked / Shore Lines.” Here we wander the shore alongside the poet, following a mind at work, and seemingly in the act of making, as she both “embraces” and “deform[s]” the triolet:

call it a form
call it a game
call it lukewarm
this embrace of a form
gone centuries cold—not even lukewarm—
and content come
a cropper. Deform
to this endgame.