Seven Notebooks

by Campbell McGrath

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 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061751516
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/27/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	242
File size:	730 KB

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.

Read an Excerpt

Seven Notebooks
Poems

Ode to Inspiration

Then the imagination withdraws, drifts across the table
to investigate the glass flowers rolled in cloth tape.

It hovers, probes the petals, some like galaxies,
some like figs or seashells. Dutiful and penitent,

it shimmers back across the gulf of air,
without a metaphor, to doze away the afternoon.

Rain.
Unseasonably hot day.

Imagination is the builder, the worker bee,
but inspiration is the queen.

And when she leaves me, where does she go
if not back to the hive to gorge on royal jelly,

back into her cave of winds, accumulating
density, growing richer and darker,

like mercury in the bloodstream,
like extravagant honey.

Seven Notebooks
Poems. Copyright © by Campbell McGrath. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

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.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Publishers Weekly

Basho's travel sketches or Issa's haibun, the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, the chronicles of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, the American realism of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the wit of Kenneth Koch-these are only some of the resonances evoked by this highly textured poetic journal. McGrath, author of six previous books of poetry and recipient of a MacArthur grant, explores how life generates art, documenting a year in seven notebooks: Blueberry, Civilization, Papyrus, Dawn, Hurricane, Luxury, and Astral. Running on nature or design-the best writing here describes sea landscape-his engine whirrs through seasons and places, work (Miami), vacations (Jersey shore), family, and former urban home (Chicago). Each section employs an expedient language: "Ovarian cysts are not at all uncommon, and they are likely to be benign." "August 8" is a lovely, wistful litany about the simultaneity of experience: "Someone is studying the Audubon Field Guide, someone is missing the jingle of absent keys. Someone is choosing the blueberry over the strawberry rhubarb pie." "Eclogue" expresses the joy of making, like that of the coco frio vendor to whom he gives his backyard coconuts: "the giant tree laden with dozens/ of fat coconuts in the backyard, and he says/ ¡cocos tremendos!, vowing to come back tomorrow/ with a bigger ladder." Fun, serious, moving; for all collections.-Ellen Kaufman, Dewey & LeBoeuf Law Lib., New York

Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

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