Stumble, Gorgeous
Paula McLain

Light-hearted, though wearing a heavy heart, Paula McLain tries her best to shake her cast of invisible fathers. It’s brave to interrogate and, Job-like, dispense of heaven to go on living in and of this world. Stumble, Gorgeous offers her most powerful and accomplished writing to date: the music sings metrically and in a range of sounds and voices; the syntax unfolds pleasure and difficulty in uneven doses and often surprises in its jangling turns. It’s hard to improve on lines of intelligence and grace like these: “We learn to love by loving silhouette, / We learn to love as a kind of jangling / Prayer, vernacular cant to the floppy horizon, / The unhearing, unheard from hole at the center of.” One marvels at her playful openness, but more so at her passionate movement toward acceptance: “Flushed, / breathing, making do.”

—Ira Sadoff

For a mother to abandon her children is a desertion of mythic proportions. In these poems Paula McLain is able, somehow, to find what is archetypal in the ensuing devastation and rebuilding of a human being. We watch as she moves from the place where “the kingdom of memory is the kingdom of counting / on nothing” to one where she can, with her fingernails, “scratch” self “in a cradle of roots,” and finally arrive at “how the mudbaby left in a field for the crows / To mother becomes a mother herself.” And she gets there with the rasp and backbone of our most basic music, music of the “Lark and swale and rucksack; / the halt and the toppled; the rapt.”

—Jane Mead

New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331

| Home | Book Index |