These preposterous hyperbolic outbursts that taint the inside covers of so many otherwise noteworthy books usually get me wincing like a convict before a firing squad. In this case, however, it actually serves the poet rather well. Just a few stanzas into McGrath’s 6^th collection of poems, one gets the sense of how unnecessary ornate introduction is to a poet of this caliber. The plainspoken sincerity of so many of these poems goes to show how little more really needs to be said (unless you’re a publicist for an imprint of HarperCollins).

Commanding the effortless lyricism of Horace and offering a gust of fresh air to fans of Mark Doty, Mary Oliver or Charlie Smith, Campbell McGrath’s work is a tutorial in restraint. Only our best poets – Stephen Dunn and John Ashbery come to mind – manage such a confident balance between self-effacement and pathos, solemnity and jubilance. Particularly enjoyable about Pax Atomica’s handful of masterpieces is a courageous fusion of humor into the taut lyricism of “Girl With Blue Plastic Radio” or “Infinite Needs” that stands in direct defiance of the indulgent pretense alluded to above.

It isn’t an easy rope to walk, and McGrath does not always manage without a misstep. The poem “Zeuga,” with its “cartographic correlatives,” “autochthonic agons” and random Latin, suggests the desperate vocabulary of a tweed-clad professor in his 8^th decade soliciting a publisher for his book on the overlooked poetics of the isosceles triangle. Yet these rare derailments are only distasteful interludes between delights, enhancing the reader’s surprise at McGrath’s abrupt descriptive genius.

One minute we grin harmlessly at “Benjamin Franklin flying a kite,” and the next we enter a bleak Wyoming “where a dozen splayed elk/hit by a truck at the false lick of rock salt/bleed the fast lane to ruddy ice, then skid/the last exit to escape an impending whiteout/in Salt Lake.” A wild imagination and hysterical sense of humor (as in the lines “I do not say this lightly/but the sandwiches at Subway/suck” or the rhyming of “rekindle” with “Bullwinkle”) never allow the stark bleakness of these landscapes to overwhelm the book as a whole.

McGrath is particularly riveting when he tells down-to-earth stories of his rock ‘n’ roll youth and of “a tough-love boot camp/to which the dysfunctional 70s were sent to sober up.” McGrath pokes fun at the inanity of pop music with both wild humor and a provocative self-deprecation that encourages us to laugh not only at the speaker but also at ourselves. From the arbitrariness of Toto and Led Zeppelin lyrics to the broken promises of Johnny Rotten and Peter Frampton’s “talking guitar,” hardly any cultural phenomenon escapes McGrath’s penetrating inquiry. 

            Just as the reader chuckles while McGrath turns the famous Zeppelin line “been a long time since I rock & rolled” into “been a long time since the Dead Sea Scrolls,” one only needs to turn a couple more pages to be hypnotized by the poet’s ability to glean the most profound implications from the cheapest cultural icons in “Hits of the 70s,” perhaps the book’s best poem:
 

And was it three or only two summers later
the slate-roofs of Paris confided the intricacies of their art
as I walked the streets of the Latin Quarter
fueling the arson of my first broken heart with vin
ordinare and apple-bongs of Moroccan hash
and the Kerosene catechism of “Prove It All Night”?
Baby, tie your hair back in a long white bow,
meet me in the fields behind the dynamo . . .
What was it all about, this thing between men and women?
What did it all mean, what was it worth, and anyway,
what was a dynamo? Was it Paris? Springsteen?
Was I the dynamo, whirling with my dog’s-night of desolation,
mawkishly sentimental as the harpsichord chorale
we drank gin to in the last pew of some candlelit cathedral?
 

Yes, there is the “abecedarian” poem “Of Pure Forms” and a handful of impressive exercises in terza rima, and while these formal adventures demonstrate McGrath’s confidence and range, they also show how easily he packages the sustained lyrical intensity of his free verse poems within the confines of more demanding structures.

Despite these constraints on McGrath’s irrepressible imagination, “Girl With Blue Plastic Radio,” one of the book’s terza rima poems, still finds “something new in the acorn-scented dark” where the speaker heard his first song, a “melody lost in the database of the decades/but still playing somewhere in the mainframe cerebellums/of its dandelion-chained, banana-bike-riding, Kool-Aid-addled listeners.” If anything, the challenges of form deepen McGrath’s lyrical gifts. Along with his acute cultural awareness, humor and biting lyricism, it is this versatility and confidence that will establish Pax Atomica as one of the year’s best books and Campbell McGrath as a premier American poet.