Maureen N. McLane

Prose poetry,​ the bête noire of traditionalists, has existed since at least the 1840s, though as recently as 1979 Mark Strand was denied a Pulitzer Prize because his collection The Monument was made up of prose poems. These days it often appears, in anglophone poetry at least, as one option among many: free verse, formal verse, prose poetry, erasure poetry, whatever – it’s...

The rocks individuated as peopleif you register peopleas individuals, which I do,haplessly, helplessly, when forced,fright or flight or love or _______.

The plants need water.The rhododendrons are drooping.Your lust for the contemporaryis understandable but mildly disappointing.

She made me a latte,today’s small gift.They must be annoyed, the onesliving now next to a construction site.

For Anne-Lise François

For you I got up to see the moon.Say it was 4 a.m.Say then it was 8.30ish.These are not natural hoursbut hours of a kind, my little book of,a little digital scannable book.A telepathy toward.I know you feelwhat there is to feeland oh movement.Say it was a kind of moon              near half....

She travels to Greece on a boat with Havelock Ellis, finds herself in Egypt just when King Tut’s tomb is opened, gets photographed by Man Ray, has sherry with Elizabeth Bowen, runs into Arthur Waley at Iseult Gonne’s, becomes Freud’s analysand in 1933, reads her poetry before the future Queen Elizabeth II during the Second World War. One wonders why there has been no biopic, or at least a mini-series. (Please, no one do this.)

The magpie came back to the courtyard & its deep chill the magpie was a jay was a jackdaw was a bird in Germany if not a German bird. Whither the Carolingians and their monks whose recipes called for cinnamon from the Far East? You say cinnamon, I say cassia, though we’ve never between us tasted the famously fragrant spice Cinnamomum zeylanicum, nor the aromatic bark qirfah which...