Research Catalog

American noise

Title
American noise / Campbell McGrath.
Author
McGrath, Campbell, 1962-
Publication
Hopewell, NJ : Ecco Press, [1993], ©1993.

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StatusFormatAccessCall NumberItem Location
TextRequest in advance PS3563.C3658 A84 1993Off-site

Details

Description
67 pages; 24 cm
Summary
  • American Noise is a rapturous exploration of American culture and landscape. With compassionate wit and insight, Campbell McGrath transports us on a journey through contemporary society, transforming the commonplace into scenes of profound revelation.
  • From late-night bars to early-morning diners, suburban malls to the Mojave Desert, McGrath's meticulously detailed vision defines singular moments of joy and melancholy in familiar local images: "Buick Electras rusting in the freight meadow;" "sprinklers whirling like tireless apostles;" "glaciers and missile silos,/grey whales and cheese dogs;" "autumn maples and distant music and smokestacks/wreathed in fog.".
  • Reaching beyond the rhythms and texture of the "real" America, these poems discover the secret purgatory of the lost pop-culture icons of the post-Baby Boom generation - "an eternal Las Vegas of the soul." McGrath's elegiac vision encompasses Elvis and Jack Kerouac, Marilyn Monroe and Jimi Hendrix, Sylvia Plath and Speed Racer. In a voice at once universal and distinctly of his generation, he memorializes the past even as he documents the present.
  • While the poems of American Noise delight in exuberant energy and action, they can also provide a place of repose where the "voice-storm" of particulars is quietly and tenderly transformed. Campbell McGrath sees and interprets the paradoxes and manic possibilities of American life with a unique combination of comic ebullience and sensitivity. He bears witness to the consuming fires of American culture, and to the "resin and ash of human loss" left in their wake.
  • American Noise is a testament to the "journey toward purity of vision" McGrath imagines as the artist's goal, and as the deepest aspiration of the human spirit.
Contents
Wheatfield Under Clouded Sky -- Almond Blossoms, Rock and Roll, the Past Seen as Burning fields -- Wheel of fire, the Mojave -- Sunset, Route 90, Brewster County, Texas -- Angels and the Bars of Manhattan -- James Wright, Richard Hugo, the Vanishing forests of the Pacific Northwest -- Fire & Ash, Times Square, New Year's Day -- Smokestacks, Chicago -- Night Travelers -- Blue Tulips and Night Train for Jack Kerouac's Grave -- Wild Thing -- Sugar Skulls, Oaxaca -- Nagasaki, Uncle Walt, the Eschatology of America's Century -- Two figures with Heat Lightning in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains -- Rock Falls, Illinois -- Dawn -- At the Freud Hilton -- Shrimp Boats, Biloxi -- Ode to the Wild Horses of Caineville, Utah.
ISBN
0880013354 :
LCCN
93020698
OCLC
  • 28255932
  • ocm28255932
Owning Institutions
Columbia University Libraries