Forage
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Winner of Weatherford Award for Best Poetry Book about Appalachia
A poet acclaimed for "uncompromising, honest poems that sound like no one else" (The Rumpus) now offers considerations of the natural world and humans' place within it in ecopoetry of both ambitious reach and elegant refinement
Rose McLarney has won attention as a poet of impressive insight, craft, and a "constantly questioning and enlarging vision" (Andrew Hudgins). In her third collection, Forage, she continues to weave together themes she loves: home, heritage, the South, animals, water, the environment. These intricately sequenced poems take up everything from animals' symbolic roles in art and as indicators of ecological change to how water can represent a large, troubled system or the exceptions of smaller, purer tributaries. At the confluence of these poems is a social commentary that goes beyond lamenting environmental degradation and disaster to record--and augment--the beauty of the world in which we live.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McLarney (Its Day Being Gone) takes up the challenge facing all poets writing in the era of the sixth extinction: how to match the highly personal, lyric impulse to species-wide, even planetary imperatives. "In my life, I have made unusually much time for looking," the poet writes in one of this haunting book's many ambivalent gestures: at once almost embarrassed by her own powers of discernment, yet also sure of the world's need for high-minded interventions; "There's a dwindling woodland beyond the window/ turned away from, by me in my admiring, by art/ finding its ending." Rhetorical questions abound as poem after poem delivers elegant, if also familiar epigrams: "Who doesn't know Audubon shot the birds he admired,/ stuffed them to make models?" and "Wildflowers tend to themselves// while all people plant these days are satellite dishes." McLarney settles easily into the posture of generalized, humanistic guilt: "Yet we all want the measures, so much extension,/ even of these days," as if there are universal sentiments that "the small/ mind asks when someone speaks/ about the big picture." Readers will revel in the work's undeniable beauty and smarts.
