Enduring Love: Collected Poems

Robert McLean is a defiantly modernist poet who often uses traditional metres and rhyme to explore the complexities of history and selfhood. His intellectually cosmopolitan and questioning verse attempts to re-illuminate how acts of attention—by Nijinsky, Andrea del Sarto, David Esterley, Charles Fourier, John Mulgan and others—have sanctified, if only momentarily, the world with all its wrecks and wonders. Enduring Love features a generous selection of poems from his four previous collections; the sixty-two sestet tour de force ‘A Graveyard by the Sea’; and more than thirty new poems, including two long sequences: ‘The Passions of William Colenso’ and ‘A Fantasia in the Voice of D’Arcy Cresswell’. Robert McLean is a defiantly modernist poet who often uses traditional metres and rhyme to explore the complexities of history and selfhood. His intellectually cosmopolitan and questioning verse attempts to re-illuminate how acts of attention—by Nijinsky, Andrea del Sarto, David Esterley, Charles Fourier, John Mulgan and others—have sanctified, if only momentarily, the world with all its wrecks and wonders. Enduring Love features a generous selection of poems from his four previous collections; the sixty-two sestet tour de force ‘A Graveyard by the Sea’; and more than thirty new poems, including two long sequences: ‘The Passions of William Colenso’ and ‘A Fantasia in the Voice of D’Arcy Cresswell’.