The flap copy of this book calls it “a season-by-season account of a year in the life of its narrator,” and says it’s “not a novel in verse, not a poetic journal, but a lyric chronicle,” all of which sounds promising—though really, it was the cover that caught my eye when I saw this book on a table in McNally Jackson sometime over the winter. (It’s a print by Hiroshige: “Mannen Bridge, Fukagawa.”)
I like (some of) the journal-ish prose-ish poems best, the clear and solid images of them. Elsewhere, I feel like there’s often this over-the-top-ness to McGrath’s phrasing, something show-off-ish, a pulling back from the beautiful or “poetic” image: but I like the beauty more. In one poem, for example, he describes the plantar fascia as the “inverted hammock/on which the body rests its burden”— a pleasing image—then follows it with “like a red-faced tourist/in the shadow/of a coconut palm” (“Ode to the Plantar Fascia,” p 8). Bashō and his poems come up a few times in the first of the seven notebooks, and I like McGrath best when he’s seeing the world in a Bashō-esque way: luminous images. In poems like “January 17,” there’s play and playfulness, but also a willingness to let the image sit: “Flocks of ibis on old tractors in cleared fields,” or “pickups selling roasted corn or watermelons” (pp 10-11). This whole poem is great, full of growing things (strawberries, eggplants, snapdragons) and the details of place, the changing landscape of South Florida, bits like this:
From here the city is everything to the east, endlessly ramified tile-roofed subdivisions of houses and garden apartments, strip malls, highway interchanges, intransigent farmers holding their patchwork dirt together with melons and leaf lettuce—the very next field has been harrowed and scoured and posted for sale— (p 14)
I love some of McGrath’s descriptions of the everyday, like the bit in “Dahlias” where the narrator talks about “Life in the surface of things, artifactual energy, layer upon layer, room after room,” and then: “Shoes piled in a basket by the door. Umbrellas, a lunchbox, a brown paper shopping bag, the familiar loops of its handles, arc of the string like the curve of the skater’s trajectory and the steam from the cooling towers blown west” (p 40). Also satisfying: the poems that describe the landscape as seen from airplane windows, the forms of the earth and the forms of the things people have built on it, and “April 26,” the funny and sweet conversational tone of it: kids and a playground and ivy on stone walls. In the “Dawn Notebook” section, there are many haiku, some of which are too funny/gimmicky, but some of which have grace, like the last bit of “Night Mist” and all of “August.” Toward the end of the book, “Eclogue,” which juxtaposes Hiroshige and Miami, is great, and so is “Hiroshige,” a few pages later. (Read both here.)
Leave a Reply