Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems

by Campbell McGrath, Campbell McGrath (Read by)

Overview

A major new collection from one of our best loved, most celebrated, and most original poets

Deeply personal but also expansive in its imaginative scope, Nouns & Verbs brings together thirty-five years of writing from Campbell McGrath, one of America’s most highly lauded poets. Offering a hint of where he’s headed while charting the territory already explored, McGrath gives us startlingly inventive new poems while surveying his previous work—lyric poems, prose poems, and a searing episodic personal epic, “An Odyssey of Appetite,” exploring America’s limitless material and spiritual hungers.

Nothing is too large or small to remain untouched by McGrath’s voracious intellect and deep empathy—everything from Japanese eggplant to a can of Schaefer beer to the smokestacks of Chicago comes in for a close and perceptive look even as McGrath crosses borders and boundaries, investigating the enduring human experiences of love and loss.

A book that stands on its own solid foundation, Nouns & Verbs captures the voice and vision of a truly singular poet.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982625849
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	04/02/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d)

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.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xiii

1 New Poems Saying No 3

Pentatina for Five Vowels 4

A Greeting on the Trail 5

My Music 7

Birds and Trees 10

Four Love Poems 12

Andromeda 16

My Sadness 17

Patrimony 18

Reading Emily Dickinson at Jiffy Lube 19

Saying Goodbye to Paul Walker 22

Cryptozoology 24

Another Night at Lester's 25

Sleepwork 27

The Red Dragonfly: After Shiki 34

Four Elegies 37

My Moods 41

Tools 43

Words 44

Two Nocturnes 45

My Estate 48

Releasing the Sherpas 49

2 Poems

The Human Heart 53

The Golden Angel Pancake House 54

The Orange 57

Sugar or Blood 59

Capitalist Poem #5 61

Sunrise and Moonfall, Rosarito Beach 62

Night Travelers 63

Sleep 65

Where the Water Runs Down 66

Books 69

Late Spring 70

Spicer 72

Invitations 73

Emily and Walt 74

Florida 76

California Love Song 77

Angels and the Bars of Manhattan 78

Ode to a Can of Schaefer Beer 82

Poetry and the World 85

Girl with Blue Plastic Radio 87

Wheel of Fire, the Mojave 89

Consciousness 92

Smokestacks, Chicago 93

The Burning Ship 95

The Future 96

The Zebra Longwing 97

Nights on Planet Earth 98

3 Prose Poems

Sunset, Route 90, Brewster County, Texas 103

Plums 104

Rifle, Colorado 106

West Virginia 107

Langdon, North Dakota 109

Delphos, Ohio 111

A Dove 114

The Leatherback 115

Squid 117

Praia dos Orixás 119

Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys 123

Philadelphia 126

Tabernacle, New Jersey 127

Memphis 129

Baker, California 131

North Carolina 133

Manitoba 134

Rice & Beans 135

American Noise 136

Capitalist Poem #25 137

Krome Avenue (January 17) 140

The Prose Poem 145

Dahlias 147

The Custodian 149

The Gulf 152

The Wreck 154

Silt, Colorado 155

Dawn 156

4 An Odyssey of Appetite

The Genius of Industry 163

Almond Blossoms, Rock and Roll, the Past Seen as Burning Fields 170

Commodity Fetishism in the White City 173

Benediction for the Savior of Orlando 194

Nagasaki, Uncle Walt, the Eschatology of America's Century 198

Guns N' Roses 204

September 11 208

Shopping for Pomegranates at Wal-Mart on New Year's Day 217

5 Poems

Woe 221

The Key Lime 222

Vice President of Pants 223

Wild Thing 224

Poem That Needs No Introduction 227

Poetry and Fiction 232

Hemingway Dines on Boiled Shrimp and Beer 233

Maizel at Shorty's in Kendall 234

What They Ate 235

Capitalist Poem #36 236

Ode to Bureaucrats 237

Because This Is Florida 239

Villanelle 240

James Wright, Richard Hugo, the Vanishing Forests of the Pacific Northwest 241

Allen Ginsberg 243

Pax Atomica Triptych 245

Capitalist Poem #57 251

The Manatee 252

Storm Valediction 253

Rock Falls, Illinois 254

The Fly 256

Zeugma 258

Egyptology 260

The Toad 262

Shrimp Boats, Biloxi 266

Then 268

Luxury 269

Campbell McGrath 270

Editorial Reviews

"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.

The New York Times Book Review - Troy Jollimore

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.)

Publishers Weekly

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)

From the Publisher

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

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

McGrath’s absorbing, amusing, and reflective traveling music entices us on the road yet again.

Booklist (starred review)

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

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

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

APRIL 2019 - AudioFile