Road Atlas: Prose and Other Poems – Personal, Accessible, and Provocative Poetry of Place and Everyday Experience

by Campbell McGrath

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 ).

Genres: Poetry

74 pages, Paperback

First published August 6, 1999

About the author

Campbell McGrath (born 1962) is a modern American poet. He is the author of nine full-length collections of poetry, including his most recent, Seven Notebooks (Ecco Press, 2008), Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Ecco Press, 2009), and In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys (Ecco Press, forthcoming, 2012).
Contents

1 Life
2 Music
3 Awards
4 Works
5 Bibliography
6 References
7 External links

Life

McGrath was born in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in Washington, D.C., where he attended Sidwell Friends School; among his classmates was the poet Elizabeth Alexander. He received his B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1984 and his MFA from Columbia University's creative writing program in 1988, where he was classmates with Rick Moody. He currently lives in Miami Beach, Florida, and teaches creative writing at Florida International University, where his students have included Richard Blanco, Susan Briante, Jay Snodgrass and Emma Trelles. He is married to Elizabeth Lichtenstein, whom he met while he was an undergraduate; they have two sons.[1]
Music

In the early 1980s, while a student at the University of Chicago, he was a member of the punk band Men From The Manly Planet.[2]
Awards

McGrath has been recognized by some of the most prestigious American poetry awards, including the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award (for "The Bob Hope Poem" in Spring Comes to Chicago, his third book of poems), a Pushcart Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, a Ploughshares Cohen Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Award." In 2011 he was named a Fellow of United States Artists.[3]
Works

While primarily known as a poet, McGrath has also written a play, "The Autobiography of Edvard Munch" (produced by Concrete Gothic Theater, Chicago, 1983); a libretto for Orlando Garcia's experimental video opera "Transcending Time" (premiered at the New Music Biennalle, Zagreb, Croatia, 2009); collaborated with the video artist John Stuart on the video/poetry piece "14 Views of Miami" (premiered at The Wolfsonian, Miami, 2008); and translated the Aristophanes play The Wasps for the Penn Greek Drama Series.
Bibliography

Dust (chapbook, Ohio Review Press, 1988)
Capitalism (Wesleyan University Press, 1990)
American Noise (Ecco Press, 1993)
Spring Comes to Chicago (Ecco Press, 1996)
Road Atlas (Ecco Press, 1999)
Mangrovia (chapbook, Short Line Editions, 2001)
Florida Poems (Ecco Press, 2002)
Pax Atomica (Ecco Press, 2004)
Heart of Anthracite: New & Collected Prose Poems (Stride Press, UK)
Seven Notebooks (Ecco Press, 2008)
Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Ecco Press, 2009)
The Custodian & Other Poems (chapbook, Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2011)
In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys (Ecco Press, 2012)

References

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of mostly prose poems by one of my favorite modern poets. McGrath is very good on "the road".

[Don Wentworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

What's a prose poem, you ask? Something Campbell McGrath writes exceptionally well is the answer. This is as good a volume of modern American poetry as you are likely to encounter and, as such, is highly recommended.

McGrath references James Wright an American master of the prose poem, and, though not quite up to that level, these poems are very fine, indeed.

[Binx Perino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly, really witty and interesting.

[Tristan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Road Atlas was good, but not stellar. When I read the later In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys: Poems, I felt that the prose poems were among the weaker offerings of the collection. As such, I was a little nervous when I saw that Road Atlas was almost exclusively prose poems. The form did work somewhat better here than in his later collection, but there were still a number of rather lackluster pieces, and the best poem was "Biscayne Boulevard", one of the few verse (or verse only) pieces in the book. The poems of Road Atlas are a chronicle of travels, of movements and locations, mimicking the book of maps that titles the collection. McGrath displays an engagement with his surroundings, spinning environmental travelogues and tourist rhapsodies. The only sense of place notably absent from the collection is one of home. He goes everywhere, but no impression is ever provided of centrality; McGrath gives transience to all locations equally, even when describing permanent abodes and referencing his position as a professor at Florida International University.
He tends toward the fancifully mundane in his imagery, vibrant and sideways, but not always successful. Some of the best images:

"Evenings, working girls from the topless clubs shop their wares
among these stripmalls of chop suey and gospel Creole,

glass bones of liquor stores,

the glorious ruin of these moherls: New Deal, Mardi Gras,
Vagabong, Hacienda" (From "Biscayne Boulevard")

"On TV: images of flame, multitudes of flame, silent minions and consorts of flame." (from "Baker, California")

"It is not the life but the poems that matter to me, those you abandoned with mere hints and allegations, Christmas toys agog on the rug, their hungry mouths, demanding as tulips, impatient as an infant" (from "Sylvia Plath")

Some of the images that were less functional:

"a neighborhood place among passageways of date-palms, clean and friendly, where I am catered to like a meteorite crash-landed in the courtyard" (from "Yogurt & Clementines")

"is as nothing to what we left behind,
the merest anthill against the great Pyramid of Cheops,
a sidewalk crevice compared to that Grand Canyon of commodities.
Bright laughter, summer skies. So they descended into the abyss." (from "Capitalist Poem #42")

The best poems--"Biscayne Boulevard", "Sylvia Plath", "Baker, California", "Manitoba", "Tabernacle, New Jersey", and "The Gulf"--are fantastic and sensitive, but the weaker pieces seem to be reaching unsuccessfully for the same things that he accomplishes during the best of them. A collection worth reading, but not one to go too far out of one's way to find.

[lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

esp. "Baker, California."

[Casey Longo · Rating 4 out of 5]

worth reading for "Mainitoba".

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strikingly mediocre.

[William Zhao · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most interesting prose poets in America.