~MIKE CHASAR~
CAMPBELL
MCGRATH: PAX ATOMICA
It’s
probably no coincidence that McGrath was assembling
this book as he
turned the big four-oh; the terza rima form
of Dante’s Divine
Comedy
shapes nine of the book’s 22 poems
and suggests McGrath’s in his
own
dark wood seeking
some postmodern Virgil in the
shape of John Lennon
or
Axl Rose to lead him out.
"Land speculation / is a national
fixation," the Miami-based, award-winning poet Campbell McGrath claimed
in his 1996 collection Spring Comes
to Chicago, and as the titles of
his two following books (Florida Poems
and Road Atlas) also suggest,
speculation on land is one of the poet's personal fixations as
well. Much of McGrath's work up to this point has indeed had its
source and inspiration in the relationships between people and place,
but if he calls out, "Hear me now, o Floridian muse!" in the final poem
of 2002's Florida Poems, his
obsession has, three years later, shifted
distinctly to a fourth dimension.
Pax Atomica,
in contrast, is dedicated to time — "For
1962" to be exact, the year of the Missile Crisis, the University of
Mississippi race riots, John Glenn's orbit of earth, Marilyn Monroe's
death, and, not coincidentally, McGrath's birth. "Strange," he
reflects in the book's closing lines, after tracing his history through
60 pages of music, movies and TV shows, "the way one’s life comes to
seem a historical drama." And, in keeping with the
characteristics of his other work, that is a historical diorama
gleefully filled with all matter of Americana. Plastic radios,
Kool-Aid, Clint Eastwood, Xena the Warrior Princess, and rock and
rollers like Led Zeppelin, Lou Reed and Ted Nugent, make up the
landscape and soundtrack for the book — a continual
"communication from
the gigawatt voice / of the culture — popular culture, mass culture,
our
culture — kaboom! — "
That cartoonish yet disconcerting "kaboom" indicates
that all is not Pax in this America, however, that it's a landscape
clouded by intimations of mortality as well — both for the poet and
nation "for whom beginnings [have] signified better than endings." It's
probably no coincidence that McGrath was assembling this book as he
turned the big four-oh; the terza
rima form of Dante's Divine
Comedy
shapes nine of the book's 22 poems and suggests McGrath's in his own
dark wood seeking some postmodern Virgil in the shape of John Lennon or
Axl Rose to lead him out. The collection even comes with a memento mori straight
outta "Americana Park": a plastic, mass produced,
charm-bracelet skull placed in the middle of an otherwise moss-green
cover.
If Pax Atomica
reads like a poet taking stock — in
himself, his work, his culture — then that self-evaluation is carried
out, like the book's narrative, via the language of rock and
roll. "I'm still listening to Steely Dan / contemplating
virtuosity," McGrath writes and then asks, "How good is good / enough?
How much polish is too much, how much / silver-toned studio gloss
before the baby goes blind. . .?" For a writer whose poems
sometimes read like long, confident, inexhaustible guitar-solos and
riffs on American culture, these anxieties are surprisingly candid and
even touching. Ventriloquized through the "gigawatt voice" of the
larger culture — in the "meaningless fretwork arabesques tossed / like
handfuls of precious figs to the faithful air" — they're saved from
sentimentality yet expressive all the same.
Pax Atomica
is McGrath's shortest book in a decade,
and — to continue the musical comparison — it sometimes feels like an
album
of B-sides. Maybe that's a cause for critique. Maybe it
only means this is less a book for the uninitiated reader than for the
fans — for those who know, as McGrath writes via Springsteen, that
"Some
are born to run and some are born to rerun." In an America where
"nothing really dies. . .but is merely removed from the shelves for
repackaging," there’s a certain consolation in the collected but
somewhat neglected B-side that lets us know we’re "still moving
forward, not yet dreaming in reverse."
McGrath, Campbell. Pax
Atomica. New York, NY: Ecco,
2004. ISBN: 0060745649 $23.95
© by Mike Chasar
