Seven Notebooks: Poems

by Campbell McGrath

Book Overview

An ant to the stars
or stars to the ant--which is
more irrelevant?

Weekend Jet Skiers--
rude to call them idiots,
yes, but facts are facts.

Clamor of seabirds
as the sun falls--I look up
and ten years have passed."
--from "Dawn Notebook"

Such is the expansive terrain of Seven Notebooks the world as it is seen, known, imagined, and dreamed; our lives as they are felt, thought, desired, and lived. Written in...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061254657
• ISBN13: 9780061254659
• Release Date: February 2009
• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 4.9" x 6.9"

Customer Reviews

Ended up loving it despite my expectations.

Campbell McGrath, Seven Notebooks (Ecco, 2008) "If I were Virgil this would be an eclogue.", Campbell McGrath tells us toward the end of Seven Notebooks. In many ways, that's exactly what this is. Wikipedia defines "Eclogue" as "a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject". Almost one hundred fifty years after Whitman, it could be argued that his sort of thick, loose-limbed free verse has become something of a classical style, and there's no denying that McGrath's ponderings of nature, and man's relations to it, are pastoral subjects. "Water choppy, strong current ripping south along the beach. After a while we see, approaching from the north, dark patches in the swells, like cloud shadows or seaweed but it is fish, clumps and schools and swarms of them, here come six at a time, then a dozen, a hundred, a thousand thrashing the surface as they approach, surging and swirling around us--" ("Jacks") I'm not usually a fan of McGrath's narrative approach to the world around him, and the fact that I liked this book as much as I did impresses me all the more. Sure, there are some places where McGrath veers back to the conventional (the longest piece in the book, as seems de rigeur these days, is a meditation on September 11, 2001), and some places where he heads much farther out into the experimental world (one early piece detailing a conversation reminds me of nothing so much as a poem from the New Yorker, which I believe was called "Mama", that my 12th-grade English teacher was constantly pulling out to show us how far the boundaries of poetry could stretch), but I think Virgil would've been proud of most of this work. Campbell McGrath has created a small piece of wonder here; it's well worth checking out if you like poetry, and maybe even if you don't. It might get you to change your mind. ****

Expansive and liberating

McGrath's poetry is expansive and liberating. He gives us a great wealth of views and impressions of the world--and that's a great delight to the reader--a real treat. We love to fly. The views and experiences we have while in flight are some of our most interesting and thrilling. Yet few poets ever really try to capture this (exception: Joseph Brodsky). Campbell's flights take US on flights. One of my favorites: "In Flight, Chicago to Miami:" "Sound asleep for forty minutes, music playing unheeded in my ears. Waking up I check the iPod and can precisely time, by the last song I remember hearing, precisely how long I was gone. But where did I go? Then to the window: just the pattern I was looking for." And then there's this from "Phoenix:" "Like toys from a box, shaken out, bright cars and alphabet blocks strewn across the floor of the desert." Here's the thing about McGrath: he's not afraid to just be who he is and tell us about it. And this greatly liberated process of poetry gives us a world--the real world, the world of now. Here we are right now. Open your eyes and look around. Open your ears. And it's fascinating. We're looking at and experiencing what we always look at and experience: a sunrise on a beach ("June 28"). But we get it in a fuller, more expressive dose than our usual everyday. "What's oft been said but ne'er so well express't." Not afraid to push the borderline between prose and poetry. His prose notes are poetry. So what is poetry?--You tell me. Dickinson: "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off I know that is poetry." What a voice! These are notebooks, reflections, recordings. This is a voice that tells us things, experiences in the immediate now. It seems fluid, unhurried, unadorned. It seems honest. It has a flow and extension to it--open ended. Awake . . . not afraid . . . real.