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American Noise
American Noise is a rapturous exploration of American culture and landscape. With compassionate wit and insight, Campbell McGrath transports us on a journey through contemporary society, transforming the commonplace into scenes of profound revelation. From late-night bars to early-morning diners, suburban malls to the Mojave Desert, McGrath's meticulously detailed vision defines singular moments of joy and melancholy in familiar local images: "Buick Electras rusting in the freight meadow; " "sprinklers whirling like tireless apostles; " "glaciers and missile silos, /grey whales and cheese dogs; " "autumn maples and distant music and smokestacks/wreathed in fog." Reaching beyond the rhythms and texture of the "real" America, these poems discover the secret purgatory of the lost pop-culture icons of the post-Baby Boom generation - "an eternal Las Vegas of the soul." McGrath's elegiac vision encompasses Elvis and Jack Kerouac, Marilyn Monroe and Jimi Hendrix, Sylvia Plath and Speed Racer. In a voice at once universal and distinctly of his generation, he memorializes the past even as he documents the present. While the poems of American Noise delight in exuberant energy and action, they can also provide a place of repose where the "voice-storm" of particulars is quietly and tenderly transformed. Campbell McGrath sees and interprets the paradoxes and manic possibilities of American life with a unique combination of comic ebullience and sensitivity. He bears witness to the consuming fires of American culture, and to the "resin and ash of human loss" left in their wake. American Noise is a testament to the "journey toward purity of vision" McGrath imagines as the artist's goal, and as the deepe aspiration of the human spirit.
Book Details
- Publisher: Ecco Press
- Publish Date: Aug 1st, 1994
- Pages: 80
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.98in - 6.01in - 0.30in - 0.32lb
- EAN: 9780880013741
- Categories: • American - General• American - General• Medieval
About the Author
McGrath, Campbell: -
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.
Praise for this book
"Sly, passionate, funny and smart, and not in alternation but all at once, Campbell McGrath's poems are genuine, accurate, American, eccentric."-- William Matthews"What a wild, intense, and gifted poet Campbell McGrath is! American Noise is one of the best books of poetry I have read by anyone of his generation."-- Thomas Lux"Campbell McGrath writes big, roughhousing, tender, visionary, reckless, purely American poems. He's a passionate democrat, the Whitman of our spoiled world. This is a brilliant, disturbing book."-- Chase Twichell