Mudman

Mudman, a special honoree for the 2023 Able Muse Book Award, is the second full-length poetry collection by Jane McKinley. The poems interweave personal memory with historical and natural landscapes, moving between experiences of family, grief, and illness and broader meditations on war, ecology, and cultural inheritance. Drawing on images of music, myth, and daily life, McKinley examines how private stories intersect with collective histories, and she reflects on the persistence of memory and art as means of understanding loss, continuity, and resilience.

PRAISE FOR MUDMAN:

Jane McKinley's beautiful collection of poems is striking for her observations of natural things which are so close, so true, as to reveal, paradoxically, what it is to be human. At times the things she sees lead her to great music and art, as when she finds in a bird's feather "the unearthly blue / Fra Angelico used / for angels who witness / the Virgin ascending." The high point of this collection, though, is when she writes vividly of her father, who fought in World War II. Here she shows us the price of war and the absurdity of it. These poems are intense, authentic, and hard-won.

-Grace Schulman

I'm always delighted to learn a new word from poetry, and in "marcescent"-as when leaves wither yet cling to the bough-Jane McKinley has found a figure for elegy: "No time to prepare / for the loss so the dead keep rattling on." McKinley's heartbreaking poems are haunted by the ghosts of family and friends who have gone on before her, often much too soon. At the center of Mudman are poems-some "found" in letters-about McKinley's father, a World War II veteran whose death continues to possess the poet's psyche. Her many deft descriptions of nature dovetail with such losses, presenting a world in which elegy and legacy combine. A bracing, affecting collection.

-David Yezzi

Jane McKinley's Mudman has the kind of magnitude that recalls Robert Lowell's Life Studies and Amy Clampitt's The Kingfisher. I mean that McKinley achieves tremendous narrative breadth even as she reveals a lyric focus so fine that her poems incandesce. Whether mourning the loss of family and friends, attending to the natural world, or chronicling her father's service in North Africa and Italy during the Second World War, McKinley allows her subjects to break through the page, displaying their unique particularity, even as she makes her own vital sense in exquisite sentences and lines. To read these poems is to feel, as the poet writes of a hummingbird's song, "something shifted to fullness." Contemporary American poetry has more depth, and indeed more song, thanks to these superb poems. Mudman will be with us for a long time to come.

-Peter Campion

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jane McKinley is a Baroque oboist who founded the Dryden Ensemble and served as its artistic director for nearly thirty years. She holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Northwestern University and an MFA in historical musicology from Princeton University. In 2003 she began writing poetry after a lapse of thirty years and in 2008 was awarded the Patricia Dobler Prize for her sonnet, "Mud Season." Her poetry collection Vanitas received the 2011 Walt McDonald First-Book Prize and was published by Texas Tech University Press. Her poems have appeared in the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, Five Points, Baltimore Review, Great River Review, Tar River Poetry, 2River View, ONE ART, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Her honors include a 2023 Poetry Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a 2025 Fellowship at the Virginia Center of Creative Arts. She lives with her husband in Hopewell, New Jersey.