Seven Notebooks

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,...
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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.