Nouns & Verbs

February 25, 2019
With an open heart, a skeptical eye, and feet planted firmly in American soil (which holds “infant ferns,” “bulldozed stockyards,” and “pink cigarette lighters”), McGrath lets the world—from locusts in Manitoba (“an ancient horde of implacable charioteers”) to decapitated icons in Rosarito Beach, Mexico—wash over him. Leading off with a book-length set of new poems, McGrath has culled from eight of his previous 10 collections in the four sections that follow. In a mix of long-line lyric poems, short poems and prose poems, McGrath inspects all that goes by. He locks eyes with a toad (whose eyes “are gold, brilliant and metallic,// like moon-lander foil hammered over robotic orbs”) but can’t do the same with a sea turtle, who is “like the barnacled hull of an overturned rowboat” with “sinewy stumps where the flippers should be” (they have been cut off for soup). Other poems include “Reading Emily Dickinson at Jiffy Lube” (“Praise images that leap from the mind like ninjas!”) and the book’s closer, “Campbell McGrath,” a three-page piece built around a journey through towns named Campbell and McGrath (“All maps are useless now./ These final steps must be taken alone”). McGrath is intelligent company, his poems exhibiting a curious, sometimes furious mind tuning into the “literal noise of our culture,” both violent and beautiful.

Starred review from April 1, 2019
The title of the last poem in this retrospective is Campbell McGrath. It's not really autobiographical, however, and could have been put at the front of the book to indicate what this poet is all about. It's a road-atlas tour to places named Campbell, from Florida (McGrath's present homeland) to Alaska, with a southwest side-jaunt from the heartland (he grew up in Chicago, often the setting of his history-�tinted poems) to California and eventually, where the road ends, which is, of course, where the journey begins. It's hard to think of another contemporary poet who so reminds one of Whitman (a tutelary presence in many of these poems) and those later Whitmanians, Sandburg and Ginsberg, James Wright and Richard Hugo, in his frequently long-lined verses and rolling prose poems (a thick swatch of them in this five-part volume is like a festival of inspired short films) that habitually report on road trips and things that happen away from home, usually in North America, though Spain provided a particularly important youthful adventure. He has companions?friends, wife, kids?along for the rides, but he remains attentive to the ways places look and his interactions with natives and other travelers. McGrath's absorbing, amusing, and reflective traveling music entices us on the road yet again.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)