APRIL 2019 - AudioFile
Rooted in everyday experiences, Campbell McGrath’s poems have a brevity and immediacy that adapt effectively to audiobook listening. His images are literal and direct, with few metaphors or “deeper meanings,” and the poems don’t require repeated listening. McGrath’s voice doesn’t sound professionally trained, but he is a good interpreter of his poems’ rhythms and emphases, and if you like his work, you’ll surely appreciate his delivery. He does at times fall into that tone of spellbound reverence characteristic of so many academic poetry readings. But the prevailing high spirits and good humor of this collection will endear it to many listeners. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
The New York Times Book Review - Troy Jollimore
"America's epic," the poet Campbell McGrath writes, "is the odyssey of appetite." It's a good line, both clever and seductive, though in the wrong hands it's the sort of thing that could be merely reductive. But McGrath knows the ins and outs of appetite as deeply, and as thoroughly, as he knows the highways and byways of America. He has spent decades exploring both. Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems is a rich and invigorating sampling of the poetic results of these explorations.
Publishers Weekly
02/25/2019
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. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
Nouns & Verbs is a lifelong manifesto on joy and vigor, a message in a bottle for all of us who ‘scrabble within the skin of time / like mice in the belly of a boa constrictor.’” — Tracy K. Smith
“A book of extraordinary poetic energy...We finish this book with the sense that we have traveled far and wide in our country with a guide who is by turns fascinated and distressed, amazed by its rich materials and deeply disappointed with what has been done with them.” — Carl Dennis
“Campbell McGrath never fails to capture the velocity of America ‘in all its splendid yearning to be lost and longing to belong.’... Nouns & Verbs reminds us of McGrath’s singular, essential stature in contemporary American poetry.” — Terrance Hayes
“McGrath’s absorbing, amusing, and reflective traveling music entices us on the road yet again.” — Booklist (starred review)
Terrance Hayes
Campbell McGrath never fails to capture the velocity of America ‘in all its splendid yearning to be lost and longing to belong.’... Nouns & Verbs reminds us of McGrath’s singular, essential stature in contemporary American poetry.
Tracy K. Smith
Nouns & Verbs is a lifelong manifesto on joy and vigor, a message in a bottle for all of us who ‘scrabble within the skin of time / like mice in the belly of a boa constrictor.’
Booklist (starred review)
McGrath’s absorbing, amusing, and reflective traveling music entices us on the road yet again.
Carl Dennis
A book of extraordinary poetic energy...We finish this book with the sense that we have traveled far and wide in our country with a guide who is by turns fascinated and distressed, amazed by its rich materials and deeply disappointed with what has been done with them.
APRIL 2019 - AudioFile
Rooted in everyday experiences, Campbell McGrath’s poems have a brevity and immediacy that adapt effectively to audiobook listening. His images are literal and direct, with few metaphors or “deeper meanings,” and the poems don’t require repeated listening. McGrath’s voice doesn’t sound professionally trained, but he is a good interpreter of his poems’ rhythms and emphases, and if you like his work, you’ll surely appreciate his delivery. He does at times fall into that tone of spellbound reverence characteristic of so many academic poetry readings. But the prevailing high spirits and good humor of this collection will endear it to many listeners. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
