What You Want

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‘McLane is a Romantic poet out of time’ Ange Mlinko’Passionate, erudite, sensuous . . . McLane probes the minutest currents of human feeling’ Sarah Howe’My favourite living poet . . . [her work] bristles with life, feeling, argument’ Parul SeghalThe witty, searching new collection by National Book Award finalist Maureen N. McLane, musing on the sea, ageing, love and the climate crisisIn her first book of poems since What I’m Looking For: Selected Poems 2005-2017, Maureen N. McLane offers a bravura collection of perceptive poetic meditations. What You Want is a book of landscapes, mindscapes, and shifting moods. Here are poems filled with gulls and harbours, blinking red lights and empty lobster traps, beach roses and rumoured sharks, eels and crows, wind turbines and superhighways. Sensitive, lyrical, alert to seasons and pressures on our shared life, McLane registers and gives form to an ambient unease. From Sappho to Constable, from constellations to microplastics, What You Want is a collection as alive to the cosmos as it is to our moment. This is McLane’s cloudy-sky book: a voyage through lambent autumns and shining winters, in which an eye looks out on what it longs for, what it loves, and asks: will it survive the coming heat?

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