Sharply observant as Dickinson, worldly-wise as Millay, and darkly funny as Dorothy Parker, Susan McLean is a wholly original talent in American poetry. Hers is the voice of that hilarious best friend who always blurts out blunt truth while everyone else is dissembling. If she were living someplace where the general public still reads poetry, she would likely be a household word, filthy rich from poetry royalties, and the people’s choice for poet laureate. But instead, she is our unsung national treasure, and this is her best book yet.
—Julie Kane, author of Naked Ladies
[Susan McLean’s] poems brim with emotion, but it’s usually buried beneath a sharply glittering surface, so that the faultless precision of her meter covers a chaos of old and still raucously raw feeling. She is a poet to enjoy (her cleverness invites the reader in, it’s not exclusive) but also to take very seriously; her poems are wittily grim and can be simultaneously acerbic and hilarious (it’s no wonder that she has produced an acclaimed book of translations of Martial’s epigrams). To find incisive mordancy, technical brilliance, and emotional intensity together in one poem is rare enough; to find them in virtually every poem in a book seems almost impossible, but Daylight Losing Time is such a book. Highly recommended.
—Dick Davis, author of Love in Another Language
[These] poems showcase their formal skills just enough to establish the “background music” that language well used creates—the How that makes poetry Poetry—and then allows the reader to focus on the What that all writing needs to be worth reading. In this case, the What includes such considerations as aging, and the changes it works on what we think we know, have, and are; the meaning of words we count on, such as “self,” “family,” “home,” and “dying”; and the preparations we undergo—often unconsciously, earlier than we think—to learn “the art of leaving.” Read this book. It will both teach and delight you.
—Rhina P. Espaillat, author of For Instance
