McGrath's American Hero

Campbell McGrath, Shannon. Ecco/Harper Collins, 2009. $23.99 This long poem’s opening, spoken in the confiding, companionable first-person voice of a young man eager to stand out on Lewis & Clark’s team in the summer of 1804, rolls through unsettled American land near the Missouri river. Determined to prove himself, this youngest member of the Corps of Discovery rides out, without much food or ammunition, after runaway horses. He finds the horses the first day. Two weeks pass before the Corps finds him, starving, with buffalo all around him (no bullets left). The subsequent sections of the poem mark the days of the young man’s solitary trial.

The historical George Shannon—c. 1785-1836, eventually a Missouri judge known as “Peg-Leg” after an Indian ambush nearly killed him—left no journal or memoir, so the poem’s language is entirely McGrath’s. His Shannon is alert to every sight, sound, smell. He’s working. And wise, right away, to more than the surface: “the fugitives appeared/Not unhappy at sight of me.” He’s curious, excited, humorous, ambitious, self-conscious—all in the first moments of his first day alone.

For Shannon McGrath has found language that opens the mind of this emblematic New (white, Christian, colonizing) American without intruding on the reader’s experience of him. There’s Action: killing one rabbit with hard wood in place of a bullet. Suspense: in the quest for food; more, in the struggle to register every lesson in the landscape. And fantasy sex, reluctant theology, geopolitical prophecy, ant visions, buffalo dreams. It’s a film you want to watch again and again.

Actual journal entries by William Clark record Shannon’s departure before he begins to speak and his rescue after he stops on the fifteenth day. The lines of irregular length feel transparent, at the far end of the poetic scale from the charged, boisterous lines of the work McGrath is best known for. In Shannon it’s the line-breaks that make music:

Small herds Of elk coming out from the arroyo To silver water & shadows Of clouds over the same hills & wind Amongst the grasses grown Ceaseless now.

Shannon enjoys time to think. At first a conqueror, naming the place around him “Shannontown,” he begins to question

. . . our grand purpose Here, that being to keep moving To forge if even blindly Onward.

All the political fury and rhetorical dazzle McGrath packed into “The Bob Hope Poem” in Spring Comes to Chicago (1996); all the fire of his quest for America in road-trip poems from his first book, Capitalism (1990), through his prose-poem book, Road Atlas (1999), to his lumpy, fascinating journal book, Seven Notebooks (2008), take new form in Shannon (2009), his eighth book. All to ask: How do we (Americans) serve—let alone deserve—this glorious land we have lucked into?

Shannon’s hunger for food NOW becomes his ambition for the future; his awareness that he’s lost in the land becomes the new nation’s uncertain development. McGrath enlarges upon Shannon’s ambitions in this major work that has been under-noticed because Shannon doesn’t sound like “McGrath,” and because readers balked at the subtleties of Seven Notebooks. Concluding his Afterword, McGrath links our hopes to his hero’s: “George Shannon often got lost, but he always got found. May the same hold true for those who continue to follow in his footsteps, the majestic land he wandered, and the nation he was proud to call home.”

Romanticism

By April Bernard (Norton)

To last as a Romantic, April Bernard says in a recent interview, “You have to be wise and passionate.” In her fourth book of poems passion and wisdom contend for the soul of Art.

Her Romantic suffers, feeling more, about more:

. . . it was the tree that caused an uproar, it was the tree that shook and shed, aureate as a shaken soul, I remembered I was supposed to have one—for convenience

I placed it in my chest, the heart being away, and now it seems the soul has lodged there, shaking, golden-orange, half spent. . . . [from “Beagle or Something”]

Her Romantic pretends what s/he’s asking for doesn’t add up to all that much:

. . . Hands with mine in the sink, washing dishes, the smell of wool, feet tangling mine in bed. [in “Romance”]

Ha! returns The Voice, the Force the Romantic was trying to bargain with: “What lies you tell, and call them love” (the end of “Unloved”). You think you’re the only one who’s ever gone through what you’re going through?

In Romanticism, the untrammeled Romantic in us struggles for expression in Art. The winner—no question—is the reader. April Bernard can do what she chooses in a poem, and what she chooses, here, is to remind us how Romanticism—which, she says, involves “the primacy of feeling; an embrace of the irrational”—enters our lives as it sneaks into our reading and listening and thinking, with glory and agony.

Romanticism has three sections. In the first you encounter Romantic states of being and feeling; in the second, among other wonders, a whole Romantic novel created in five short poems. The third breaks into song, lyrics with no music, including arias from operas that exist only in these pages.

Bernard doesn’t hesitate to say she wants to encourage a reader "to be an individual and be in society, . . . to have strong feelings."

This extraordinarily artful book uses intense pain as one of its colors. We luxuriate in sumptuous surfaces that mask pain:

That trinket of bulbous Baja pearl, hanging from a coin-purse latch, a gift from her dear Mama. The letters sheaved in a lavender ribbon (the ribbon edged with tiny loops of silk). . . . . . . no harm she has done comes close to what has stabbed at her, what now stabs— these cheap losses. [from “Last Glimpse”]

Here we can delight in invented forms, imported forms (a ghazal, “Paler Hands,” in memory of a famous ghazal-maker), and familiar forms reworked to dazzling new purposes (the unrhymed sonnet, “Heart or Head Canard”), all shifting the pain around, finding joys within it, offering pleasures liberally. Grief for a poet-friend who loved old movies turns into a sinuous dance of words circling Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in “Notorious” (“To the Knife”). We’re surprised by humor and tickled by connections that draw each poem into a larger body of feeling.

“I am a hopeless romantic,“ Bernard wrote last fall (in an essay in Lapham’s Quarterly)—the kind of “hopeless” that means “wholehearted” rather than “without hope”—the kind of hopeless that wrestles with hope in poem after poem throughout this marvelous book, which is so good it may change your mind, and then your life.

Susan Holahan is a writer and an editor of New Haven Review.