By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Campbell McGrath's new book, Seven Notebooks, lives up to its title: The seven sections, whose contents are often dated like journal entries, make seven accounts of days and thoughts, wildly various. The first section includes "Ode to Bureaucrats" and "Ode to Blueberries" as well as the opening "Ode to Inspiration."
McGrath's audacity has a genial, sociable quality, often with a flippancy that he directs back at himself, in the American tradition of kidding, a humor that may tease greatness but makes the joke on itself. For example, "Rilke and God":
When Rilke talks about God I have no idea
what to say. It's like being buttonholed at a party
by someone who wrongly assumes you share
the urgency of their political convictions,
their devotion to a cause and its glorious leader,
a man of catastrophically dangerous power.
Time to fill your drink, grab some salted almonds.
But then he talks about art in the same voice,
and I come to see that to him they are one
and the same, aspects of an indivisible fire,
facets of a singular jewel, and I can understand
where he is coming from, I have anecdotes
to supply, grievances to air, a savvy joke,
some watercooler wisdom. And so we part
if not as friends, then, contented acquaintances.
One kind of notebook entry McGrath makes is the haiku, and here, too, there is some self-directed kidding, as in "Beauty":
Beauty of this world --
walked six miles along the beach,
counting syllables
Beauty of this world,
starlight on the salt meadow --
ah, the moon is full!
Beauty of this world
and the foghorn bemoaning
its mortality.
A five-syllable answer suitably concludes "Questions":
Middle of July --
what better for breakfast now
than blueberry pie?
Visitors tonight --
who will bike to the market
for swordfish and corn?
Elizabeth asks,
what's up with this haiku thing?
Pinecones in the sand.
McGrath's is an abundant, complex and entertaining imagination.
(Campbell McGrath's poems can be found in his book "Seven Notebooks." Ecco. Copyright 2008 by Campbell McGrath.)
Robert Pinsky's most recent book of poetry is "Gulf Music."
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