Its Day Being Gone

McLarney (The Always Broken Plates of Mountains), the National Poetry Series winner selected by Robert Wrigley, expands on her evolving portrait of Appalachia, exploring folktales and mythology of the region in addition to recounting more personal experiences. Her lines are steeped in memory, loss, love, and the immediate textures of her natural environment. “Thinking back,” McLarney writes, “is a burrowing, a blinding, slipping deep/ into the past’s pulp, scented and pearly.” Her poem “Watershed” makes connections between Appalachia and South America that carry over into the book’s second section, and combines an ode to a lover with an ode to home: “Come in and tell me I can have/ everything. That all of this I love survives.../ in this land where science has yet to name/ many creatures, as rich in breeds as the tropics, land studded with trailers/ and slash heaps that blaze into great fires, of plenty, even excess.” In “I Float,” McLarney describes her artistic awakening: “When the river flooded, when/ I was a child, I boated/ around the fields. And so it began,/ my myth-making./ ... The flood was a costumer, a jeweler./ And the way water cut ordinary sights,/ that was appealing labor.” McLarney pays homage to the land where she learned craft. (June)