“World Enough” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Maureen McLane’s second poetry collection, is a vacation unto itself. Her poems immerse readers in languid summer nights in the country and Parisian days. It is a treatise of sorts on the idea of "place": the mental, physical, visual and emotional spaces we inhabit.
The forms of McLane's poems travel too; some are modelled after British romantic ballads, others the French rondeau, a few take inspiration from the haiku and some come in free verse. This exploration, sometimes playful, sometimes academic, grants these poems lives of their own.
McLane is a professor of English at New York University, a frequent essayist and winner of the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Nona Nalakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing. In keeping with the travel theme, Maureen McLane answered More Intelligent Life's questions about criticism, form and the visual aspects of writing from “a remote region of the American north-east”.
More Intelligent Life: "World Enough" seems to encompass many worlds, emotional, temporal, natural. Why the title, "World Enough"?
Maureen McLane: The phrase “world enough” surfaced more or less organically in my poem, “Passage I":
I thought I had all the timeand world enough to discover what I shouldwhen it was overThe phrase itself comes from Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”— read more »"
What a fine theft of Marvell. A treatise on place! A variety of forms! I'm checking this out from the library as soon as I can. God, she even quotes Stevens's great remark from the Adagia (and correctly!) on place.
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