Research Catalog
American noise
- Title
- American noise / Campbell McGrath.
- Author
- McGrath, Campbell, 1962-
- Publication
- Hopewell, NJ : Ecco Press, [1993], ©1993.
Items in the Library & Off-site
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1 Item
Status | Format | Access | Call Number | Item Location |
---|---|---|---|---|
Text | Request in advance | PS3563.C3658 A84 1993 | Off-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