Seven Notebooks: Poems - Hardcover

McGrath, Campbell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0061254649 ISBN 13: 9780061254642

Publisher: Ecco, 2008

Synopsis

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 forms that range from haiku to prose, and in a voice that veers from incanta­tory to deadpan, these seven poetic sequences offer diverse reflections on language and poetry, time and consciousness, civilization and art—to say nothing of bureaucrats, surfboards, and blue margaritas. Taken collectively, Seven Notebooks composes a season-by-season account of a year in the life of its narrator, from spring in Chicago to summer at the Jersey Shore to winter in Miami Beach. Not a novel in verse, not a poetic journal, but a lyric chronicle, this utterly unique book reclaims territory long abandoned by American poetry, a characteristic ambition of Campbell McGrath, one of the most honored, accessible, and humanistically engaged writers of our time.

About this title

About the Author

Campbell McGrath is the author of nine previous books, eight of them available from Ecco Press. He has received numerous prestigious awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been published in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Poetry, and Ploughshares, among other prominent publications, and his poetry is represented in dozens of anthologies. He teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University, and lives with his family in Miami Beach.

From Publishers Weekly

McGrath's poems, like huge accordion folders—can open up wide enough to let almost anything in. Chronicling a year spent partly in and around Miami, partly in the American Northeast, and mostly with the poet's wife and young sons, this big, ambitious, optimistic volume might also be read as seven short sequences. The Blueberry Notebook pays explicit homage to the Pablo Neruda, with odes addressed, like the Chilean's, to unlikely everyday things—Ode to the Plantar Fascia, Ode to a Can of Schaefer Beer. Dawn Notebook mixes haiku about coastal New Jersey (What is the dune grass/ trying to do—praise the sun/ or go back to sleep?) with long excerpts from Whitman's prose. McGrath's fast-moving verse and prose may strike unfriendly readers as a bit glib, skipping from observation to observation rather than dwelling intensely on any one scene. Yet, for his fans, that speed is part of the point: in these sets of journals in verse and prose, as much as in his earlier, shorter books, McGrath places his own life on a large canvas, emulating History, which, he writes is continuous/ and embraces everything/ without exception. (Feb.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0061254649
• ISBN 13: 9780061254642
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240