Rose McLarney’s debut collection feels born of the same world as Irene McKinney’s first book, The Girl with the Stone in Her Lap. Both collections mine the grain and coarse chaff of the American pastoral, where “golden apples / glow in sheer skin,” and yet “Their weight breaks branches . . . and you fall in fruit.” McKinney moved from direct representations of her dark pastoral in later collections, yet those poems still contained the solemn whispers of place. McLarney’s debut arrives with equal weight as McKinney's, though McLarney appears willing to remain longer in this “harmed” world of “buildings abandoned by paint, the now unfarmed fields.”
McLarney imbues a particularly elegiac tone to her corner of the pastoral: this is a world on the brink of change, and not all of it is good. Nature’s shifts introduce “Autumn Again”:
