Seven Notebooks

<p>An ant to the stars<br />or stars to the ant--which is<br />more irrelevant?</p><p>Weekend Jet Skiers--<br />rude to call them idiots <br />yes but facts are facts.</p><p>Clamor of seabirds<br />as the sun falls--I look up<br />and ten years have passed.<br />--from Dawn Notebook</p><p>Such is the expansive terrain of <em>Seven Notebooks</em>: the world as it is seen known imagined and dreamed; our lives as they are felt thought desired and lived. Written in forms that range from haiku to prose and in a voice that veers from incanta-tory to deadpan these seven poetic sequences offer diverse reflections on language and poetry time and consciousness civilization and art--to say nothing of bureaucrats surfboards and blue margaritas. Taken collectively <em>Seven Notebooks</em> composes a season-by-season account of a year in the life of its narrator from spring in Chicago to summer at the Jersey Shore to winter in Miami Beach. Not a novel in verse not a poetic journal but a lyric chronicle this utterly unique book reclaims territory long abandoned by American poetry a characteristic ambition of Campbell McGrath one of the most honored accessible and humanistically engaged writers of our time.</p>