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Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems
A major new collection from one of our best loved, most celebrated, and most original poets
Deeply personal but also expansive in its imaginative scope, Nouns & Verbs brings together thirty-five years of writing from Campbell McGrath, one of America’s most highly lauded poets. Offering a hint of where he’s headed while charting the territory already explored, McGrath gives us startlingly inventive new poems while surveying his previous work—lyric poems, prose poems, and a searing episodic personal epic, “An Odyssey of Appetite,” exploring America’s limitless material and spiritual hungers.
Nothing is too large or small to remain untouched by McGrath’s voracious intellect and deep empathy—everything from Japanese eggplant to a can of Schaefer beer to the smokestacks of Chicago comes in for a close and perceptive look even as McGrath crosses borders and boundaries, investigating the enduring human experiences of love and loss.
A book that stands on its own solid foundation, Nouns & Verbs captures the voice and vision of a truly singular poet.
Deeply personal but also expansive in its imaginative scope, Nouns & Verbs brings together thirty-five years of writing from Campbell McGrath, one of America’s most highly lauded poets. Offering a hint of where he’s headed while charting the territory already explored, McGrath gives us startlingly inventive new poems while surveying his previous work—lyric poems, prose poems, and a searing episodic personal epic, “An Odyssey of Appetite,” exploring America’s limitless material and spiritual hungers.
Nothing is too large or small to remain untouched by McGrath’s voracious intellect and deep empathy—everything from Japanese eggplant to a can of Schaefer beer to the smokestacks of Chicago comes in for a close and perceptive look even as McGrath crosses borders and boundaries, investigating the enduring human experiences of love and loss.
A book that stands on its own solid foundation, Nouns & Verbs captures the voice and vision of a truly singular poet.
284 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 2, 2019
23 people are currently reading
166 people want to read
About the author
Campbell McGrath
32 books37 followersCampbell 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
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
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
December 13, 2020
My Sadness
Another year is coming to an end
but my old t-shirts will not be back—
the pea-green one from Trinity College,
gunked with streaks of lawn-mower grease,
the one with orange bat wings
from Diamond Cavern, Kentucky,
vanished
without a trace.
After a two-day storm I wander the beach
admiring the ocean’s lack of attachment.
I huddle beneath a seashell,
lonely as an exile.
My sadness is the sadness of water fountains.
My sadness is as ordinary as these gulls
importuning for Cheetos or scraps
of peanut butter sandwiches.
Feed them a single crust
and they will never leave you alone.
Another year is coming to an end
but my old t-shirts will not be back—
the pea-green one from Trinity College,
gunked with streaks of lawn-mower grease,
the one with orange bat wings
from Diamond Cavern, Kentucky,
vanished
without a trace.
After a two-day storm I wander the beach
admiring the ocean’s lack of attachment.
I huddle beneath a seashell,
lonely as an exile.
My sadness is the sadness of water fountains.
My sadness is as ordinary as these gulls
importuning for Cheetos or scraps
of peanut butter sandwiches.
Feed them a single crust
and they will never leave you alone.
September 20, 2019
It's been a while since a writer - new to me anyway - felt like a discovery. I liked Campbell McGrath's career anthology and look forward to more of his work.
Favorite Poems: "Birds and Trees", "Saying Goodbye to Paul Walker", "My Moods", "My Estate", "The Orange", "Ode to a Can of Schafer Beer", "Manitoba", "Rice & Beans", "Almond Blossoms, Rock and Roll, the Past Seen as Burning Fields", "Guns N' Roses", "Woe", "Vice President of Pants", "Wild Thing", "Poem That Needs No Introduction", "Poetry and Fiction", "Capitalist Poem #36", "Because This is Florida", "Villanelle", "Allen Ginsberg", "The Manatee" and "The Fly".
Favorite Poems: "Birds and Trees", "Saying Goodbye to Paul Walker", "My Moods", "My Estate", "The Orange", "Ode to a Can of Schafer Beer", "Manitoba", "Rice & Beans", "Almond Blossoms, Rock and Roll, the Past Seen as Burning Fields", "Guns N' Roses", "Woe", "Vice President of Pants", "Wild Thing", "Poem That Needs No Introduction", "Poetry and Fiction", "Capitalist Poem #36", "Because This is Florida", "Villanelle", "Allen Ginsberg", "The Manatee" and "The Fly".
September 19, 2019
Campbell McGrath's poetry is full of images of the American landscape - from Florida coastline to august Western mountains as well as long stretches of highway, gas stations, convenience stores, diners at midnight and even the most minute, mundane detritus of everyday (e.g., a crushed beer can, a dead fly). But his poetry also considers what it all means, not just how it looks, from our obsession with money and capitalism to the place of poetry in it all. A stirring, vibrant collection surveying his career. Highly recommended.
August 6, 2019
Campbell McGrath’s Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems is a wild, mischievous read that continually questions and checks a reader’s responses. Just when you’re thinking that he’s a little too self-consciously modernist, he will startle you with lines with a formal elegance that seems from another time. The section of new poems that opens the collection includes “Four Love Poems ,” the third of which closes with this couplet:
Come, I’ll shed this common cloth, you slip your silken gown .
Let moonlight be our mantle and ecstasy our crown.
The closing stanza of the fourth of those love poems combines New York School modernism with that return to formal elegance.
O let us reseed the garden and eat vegetables
and never go to town, not even for bread.
Let us inhabit the moment forever and ever.
Live with me always in the scrap heap of my heart.
The remainder of the collection reprints poems selected from eight of McGrath’s 10 previous books. As he announces in a preface to the book, characteristically departing from common procedure, the poems are grouped "by form rather than chronology. “
As worthy of the anthologies as James Wright’s classic “A Blessing” is this from McGrath:
THE ZEBRA LONGWING
Forty years I’ve waited,
uncomprehending,
for these winter nights
when the butterflies
fold themselves like paper cranes
to sleep in the dangling
roots of the orchids
boxed and hung
from the live oak tree.
Six. Eight. Eleven.
When I mist the spikes
and blossoms by moonlight
they stir but do not wake,
antennaed and dreaming
of passionflower
nectar. Never before
have they gifted us
in like manner, never before
have they stilled their flight
in our garden. Wings
have borne them away
from the silk
of the past as surely
as some merciful wind
has delivered us
to an anchorage of such
abundant grace,
Elizabeth. All my life
I have searched, without knowing it,
for this moment.
The sudden naming of the poet’s wife in the third to the last line as a noun of direct address places the reader in the privileged position of eavesdropping on an intimacy that heightens the already considerable gift of this remarkable poem. (I recall my goose-pimples when, halfway through Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory, that noun of direct address, when Nabokov’s wife enters his narrative, suggests that he’s been telling her his life all along.)
I could have done without some of the longer pieces, particularly those in the section of prose poems.
Minor observation, unrelated to McGrath’s poetry : At some point, after recoiling from the ugliness of Stephen Powers' design for the book’s cover, I recovered and realized that it aims to capture the quality of a screen on a one-armed bandit in a casino. So I can acknowledge that it’s clever, but I still find it unsightly.
Come, I’ll shed this common cloth, you slip your silken gown .
Let moonlight be our mantle and ecstasy our crown.
The closing stanza of the fourth of those love poems combines New York School modernism with that return to formal elegance.
O let us reseed the garden and eat vegetables
and never go to town, not even for bread.
Let us inhabit the moment forever and ever.
Live with me always in the scrap heap of my heart.
The remainder of the collection reprints poems selected from eight of McGrath’s 10 previous books. As he announces in a preface to the book, characteristically departing from common procedure, the poems are grouped "by form rather than chronology. “
As worthy of the anthologies as James Wright’s classic “A Blessing” is this from McGrath:
THE ZEBRA LONGWING
Forty years I’ve waited,
uncomprehending,
for these winter nights
when the butterflies
fold themselves like paper cranes
to sleep in the dangling
roots of the orchids
boxed and hung
from the live oak tree.
Six. Eight. Eleven.
When I mist the spikes
and blossoms by moonlight
they stir but do not wake,
antennaed and dreaming
of passionflower
nectar. Never before
have they gifted us
in like manner, never before
have they stilled their flight
in our garden. Wings
have borne them away
from the silk
of the past as surely
as some merciful wind
has delivered us
to an anchorage of such
abundant grace,
Elizabeth. All my life
I have searched, without knowing it,
for this moment.
The sudden naming of the poet’s wife in the third to the last line as a noun of direct address places the reader in the privileged position of eavesdropping on an intimacy that heightens the already considerable gift of this remarkable poem. (I recall my goose-pimples when, halfway through Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory, that noun of direct address, when Nabokov’s wife enters his narrative, suggests that he’s been telling her his life all along.)
I could have done without some of the longer pieces, particularly those in the section of prose poems.
Minor observation, unrelated to McGrath’s poetry : At some point, after recoiling from the ugliness of Stephen Powers' design for the book’s cover, I recovered and realized that it aims to capture the quality of a screen on a one-armed bandit in a casino. So I can acknowledge that it’s clever, but I still find it unsightly.
September 5, 2019
I admire people who can describe the ordinary in the extraordinary way poet Campbell McGrath has done here, although I estimate I only grasped the meaning behind the words a percentage of the time. Perhaps it's the travelogue aspect of "Nouns & Verbs" that put me in the right mood to enjoy these pieces in small doses. You don't want to rattle off 50, or even 25 pages at a time. Savor McGrath's usage.
July 4, 2024
There are some poems that I just adored, and I also very much appreciated his ability to see the humor/absurdity of life and communicate that so well. I’m not a fan of prose poems in general, so those I could have done without—but this is a large collection: a lot of variety and a lot to like.
Favorite poems: Poem That Needs No Introduction; Woe; Capitalist Poem #5; Poetry And Fiction; Ode To A Can Of Schaefer Beer; My Sadness; My Moods.
Favorite poems: Poem That Needs No Introduction; Woe; Capitalist Poem #5; Poetry And Fiction; Ode To A Can Of Schaefer Beer; My Sadness; My Moods.
January 31, 2020
I don't read a lot of poetry, so take my rating with a big grain of salt; I really liked this collection. Mr. McGrath has a very creative way with words expressing memories, perceptions of events and a bit of ennui for what we may have left behind pursuing modern life. This is the first poetry collection I've read since about 1981 all the way through. I am committed to reading more poetry now.
May 23, 2020
Fans of the poetry of Walt Whitman and Alan Ginsberg will find a kindred spirit in this comprehensive collection of McGrath's work. Bombastic at times and laugh-out-loud at others, this was a mostly enjoyable road trip of verse and prose poems.
September 1, 2025
Mostly enjoyable. Some poems were a little difficult to engage but I like that he writes about everyday experiences. The best poems, for me, are Night Travelers, Ode to a Can of Schaefer Beer, Saying No, The Fly, Wild Thing, The Toad, and his eponymous poem.
July 30, 2019
Exceptional.
August 4, 2019
I skimmed some of the poems here but many are powerfully evocative ....
September 26, 2019
Particularly liked his descriptions of America although I found them quite depressing if accurate.
October 4, 2019
Some of these short stories/poems were quite humorous and amusing and tickled my love of the English language. This was just an amusing quick read and more on the light hearted side, nice change.
October 29, 2022
Would give it six stars if I could.
January 24, 2024
Got to hear him at the 2024 Key West Literary Seminar-he was great!
February 18, 2025
Best imagary. And that's coming from a true fan of William Carlos Williams. Wonderful voice. If you like lyrical lines and insightful reflections, you'll love Campbell MCGrath.
August 1, 2025
It took me a while to get through this. Each poem was a full meal.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews