Road Atlas: Prose and Other Poems

by Campbell McGrath

Overview

From Brazil to Manitoba, Las Vegas to Miami Beach, 1999 MacArthur Fellow Campbell McGrath charts a poetics of place and everyday experience. Road Atlas is personal, provocative and accessible — the finest work yet from "the most Swiftian poet of his generation" (David Biespiel, Hungry Mind Review).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060935108
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/31/2001
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.22(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.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Plums

I'm sitting on a hill in Nebraska, in morning sunlight, looking out across the valley of the Platte River. My car is parked far below, in the lot behind the rest stop wigwam, beyond which runs the highway. Beyond the highway: stitch-marks of the railroad; the sandy channels and bars of the Platte, a slow wide bend of cottonwood saplings metallic in the sun; beyond the river a hazy, Cezanne-like geometry of earthy blues, greens, and browns fading, at last, into the distance. Barrel music rises up from the traffic on I-80, strings of long-haul truckers rolling west, rolling east, the great age of the automobile burning down before my eyes, a thing of colossal beauty and thoughtlessness. For lunch, in a paper bag: three ripe plums and a cold piece of chicken. It is not yet noon. My senses are alive to the warmth of the sun, the smell of the blood of the grass, the euphoria of the journey, the taste of fruit, fresh plums, succulent and juicy, especially the plums.

So much depends upon the image: chickens, asphodel, a numeral, a seashell;

one white peony flanged with crimson;

a chunk of black ore carried up from the heart of anthracite to be found by a child alongside the tracks like the token vestige of a former life—what is it? coal—a touchstone polished by age and handling, so familiar as to be a kind of fetish, a rabbit's foot worn down to bone, a talisman possessed of an entirely personal, associative, magical significance.

Why do I still carry it, that moment in Nebraska?

Was it the firsttime I'd been west, first time driving across the country? Was it the promise of open space, the joy of setting out, the unmistakable goodness of the land and the people, the first hint of connection with the deep wagon-ruts of the dream, the living tissue through which the valley of the Platte has channeled the Mormons and the 49ers, the Pawnee and the Union Pacific, this ribbon of highway beneath a sky alive with the smoke of our transit, the body of the past consumed by the engine of our perpetual restlessness? How am I to choose among these things? Who am I to speak for that younger vision of myself, atop a hill in Nebraska, bathed in morning light? I was there. I bore witness to that moment. I heard it pass, touched it, tasted its mysterious essence. I bear it with me even now, an amulet smooth as a fleshless fruit stone.

Plums.

I have stolen your image, William Carlos Williams. Forgive me. They were delicious, so sweet and so cold.

Baker, California

How many times through the suburbs of loneliness, isolated galaxies of vitriol and salt? How many times this transfigured iconography, the dry hum of terror and desolate generation? Trona, Kelso, Baker, how many journeys unto the gates of Death Valley? How many nights without refuge before one is forever marked and transformed? If the desert burns it is a property of darkness, windspur and cloven hoof, thistle like the portal of violet resolve. If the night reveals its inner self it is a property of vision, a kind of violent light, sheer and lapidary, gas stations, restaurants, assembled legions of last chance motels, nothingness amid the nothingness of everything and nothing. Ultraviolet is the world I'm looking for. The word. It is the word I'm looking for. The moment, the place, the power and righteousness of a certain melody, not even needing to believe its dark intransigence but hear and glory in it only, the moment when noise begins to resemble music, when music comes to resemble noise. This journey, that journey, burdens and joys as hallucinatory as heat waves, the past a mirage of irredeemable distance, the place where light crosses over to water, where water reduces to light. How many times such transubstantiation? Angel of chaparral, angel of mercury vapor, how even to talk about those days now?

Years later, Elizabeth and I came upon it like a vision in the wilderness, checked in to the same room at Arnie's Royal Hawaiian, the same tepid shower, the same beer and pretzels from the Stop N Go store. It was late, pitch black for hundreds of miles, and lovely in the false blue light of palm trees and neon, the rich green glow of the swimming pool. Try as I might, there was nothing I could say or do to convince her how terrible this place was, how abject a seat of desolation, why it signified despair and the madness despair brings down like unearthly snow. On TV, black and white helicopters circled the latest disasters: a train wreck, a toxic spill, a forest fire raging out of control in some wild scrub hills outside of—outside of Baker, comes a voice above the buzz of copter blades, the whole town of Baker could be at risk, is all we hear, before the audio sheers to static. Once, in New York, I saw two planes collide in midair: walking along the dock at 79th Street, deep indigo Hudson River dusk, suddenly looking up to a ball of flame, a blur, objects tumbling along divergent arcs like dancing partners slipping their moorings; the first crashing in flames atop the palisades, starting up small ruby tongues that dozens of fire engines struggled to control over the next three hours; while the second vanished beyond the heights, a palpable concussion as it hit and exploded amongst oil tanks miles away in New Jersey. I saw this, and I tell you, that moment in Baker was stranger. In room 106, all is still but the air conditioner. Beyond the window: night, blue palm trees, nothing. On TV: images of flame, multitudes of flame, silent minions and consorts of flame. We move outside to the parking lot and stare into the impervious darkness. Nothing. The ice machine whispers erotic riddles, the edge of something almost cool passes over us in the breeze. Nothing. When we come to the pool we take off our clothes, part the brilliant water, immerse our bodies in its radiance until they transform to fluid emeralds.

Baker, California, is not hell, though it bears a family resemblance. That night was no infernal mime, though it carries still a tinge of the otherworldly. The forest fire burned in Baker, Oregon, a place I'd never heard of, absurdly far away, and by morning the fire-fighters had brought it under control. Exhausted, we slept late, and when we opened the door the dry heat sucked the night's memory from our lungs. The sun was a hammer that bent our bones like iron bars in a forge. Heat-shimmers hissed audibly as they rose in swells to fuse with the roar of traffic and vanish in the colorless vacancy of the sky. Song of the oven of days. Song of the soul in the furnace of the body. At our feet, the desert begins. The grass gives out, the parking lot peters into dust, the endless grey ruined skin of the world runs off into eternity. And there is nothing I can say or do to help you.

Yogurt & Clementines

Dinner at a small restaurant I have happened upon by chance after a long day walking the city of Tunis, a neighborhood place among passageways of date palms, clean and friendly, where I am catered to like a meteorite crash-landed in the courtyard. Cracked grains and parsley, tuna fish, coarse bread. Salad of chopped and spicy peppers. And then dessert, and suddenly everything is washed away—dust of the Sahara upon my tongue, odor of sour clove at the heart of the medina, the alienation of foreign currency, the sorrow of the alley cats among the ruins of Carthage, its weird light and fragmented crypts, headless torsos, fields sewn with salt, exile and loss, even my harrowing loneliness redeemed by a saucer of sweet and liquid yogurt, golden clementines from a branch freshly cut, stems and leaves still attached, an inchworm marking the course of his dinner, gratefully, undisturbed, mouthful by tiny mouthful.

Table of Contents

The Prose Poem	1
Plums	5
Baker, California	7
Yogurt & Clementines	10
Praia dos Orixas	11
Port Olry	15
Dinosaurs	16
Rice & Beans	19
El Balserito	20
The Gulf	22
A Dove	24
Sylvia Plath	27
Biscayne Boulevard	29
Amsterdam	33
Albergo Santa Restituta	36
Mountainair, New Mexico	37
Hunger	38
A Letter to James Wright	45
Manitoba	53
Las Vegas	54
Elvis Impersonators' Day, Gulfstream Park	57
JimmyBuffett	59
Capitalist Poem #42	63
A Map of Dodge County, Wisconsin	64
Four Clouds Like the Irish in Memory	65
Tabernacle, New Jersey	67
The Wreck	70
Campbell McGrath	71

Editorial Reviews

McGrath once wrote energetically edgy, slightly difficult poems in long lines or in short prose blocks, slippery, slightly Whitmanesque catalogues of American problems, places, jobs, road trips and aggravations. He still writes them, but the edge seems diminished: the lushly topographical poems of this fourth book (most of them prose poems) have abandoned the self-skeptical oddities that made McGrath's debut, Capitalism, invigorating. Here, McGrath aims to depict an array of sites from middle America to the Latin American tropics; but the poems give the feel less of Port Olry or Miami or Tabernacle, N.J., than of a self-confident urge to describe. Part of the American Southwest is an "awful wasteland, desolate, sun-stricken, palpably grievous"; elsewhere grasshoppers' bodies are found "crushed and mangled, scaled and armatured, primordial, pharaonic." The Hoover Dam, on the other hand, is a "titanic concrete angel wing," and also "the many-chambered heart of a thing beyond our knowing." All the places the poet sees seem to stand for the human spirit, and it can thus be hard to tell them apart. The best (and most essayistic) of the book's prose blocks recall Annie Dillard in their expansive vividness. But most lack the intellective constraints, the internal questioners, that would block the road to sentimental excess. (June) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This fourth collection by the much-awarded (and this-round MacArthur grant recipient) Florida International University creative-writing professor continues the sense (from Spring Comes to Chicago and the other books) that McGrath fancies himself working a genre all his own: prose riffs that sometimes tell little stories but are not bound by the conventions of narrative. Except for some extra-long-line poems in the C.K.Williams vein, McGrath spares us the pretense of poetic lines; despite his imagistic language, his paragraphs seldom sound especially lyrical; nor do they flow on particularly poetic rhythms. Mostly, they seem like notebook jottings for a larger project—a memoir or a travelogue. "Prose Poem," which is the closest thing here to an ars poetica, relies on an extended metaphor of "formal fields" and the varieties of farming types. And McGrath's subsequent prose passages do little to clear matters up. Many of his pieces concern travel: "Plums," a typical example, recalls a hill in Nebraska and ends with the Whitmanesque echo: "I was there. I bore witness to that moment." McGrath considers moments like this far more significant than his readers will, who might simply be envious of his itinerary: he remembers a superb meal in Tunis, a festival in Brazil, a swim off a Gulf Coast island, a one-night stand in Amsterdam, his brother's wedding in Las Vegas, and a family trip to Naples. For all his hipster, "on the road" posing, McGrath goes soft when it comes to his sons, whom he quotes for cutesy effect. And his political commentary is best exhibited in the pretentiously titled "Capitalist Poem #42," which lists all that his family buys at Costco, before declaringit the "Grand Canyon of commodities." McGrath wants us to share his enthusiasm for the "freedom and speed" of the open road, but these sluggish prose pieces and poems barely reach 55.

Kirkus Reviews