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On this episode of the Poetry Podcast, Maureen N. McLane reads “The Sovereignty and the Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed,” by Liz Waldner, which was published in the The New Yorker in 2009.
McLane says that the poem, which takes its title from an early American captivity narrative, “largely moves along a very contemporary and successful accessible idiom, but everywhere tinged with a primary, almost biblical commitment.” It also conveys, she says, “the speaker’s becoming of herself partly through reading”:
McLane also reads her own poem, “Mesh,” which, she says, grew out of her interest in the ideas of environmental thinkers—the sense that “the animate and the inanimate are profoundly enmeshed … and that we make a big mistake by conceptually dividing the universe.” You can listen to McLane’s readings and her conversation with the magazine’s poetry editor, Paul Muldoon, by listening above or by downloading the podcast for free from iTunes.
