Nouns & verbs New and selected poems

Review by New York Times Review

THE NICKEL BOYS, by Colson Whitehead. (Doubleday, $24.95.) Whitehead, a Pulitzer winner for "The Underground Railroad," continues to explore America's racist legacy in this powerful novel about a serious student who dreams that college might lead him out of the Jim Crow South. Instead, he's wrongly arrested and sent to a brutal reform school modeled on a real institution. MY PARENTS: An Introduction/THIS DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU, by Aleksandar Hemon. (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) In a two-part memoir, Hemon shows how Bosnia and its wartime strife have shaped a life of exile for his family in Canada. APPEASEMENT: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War, by Tim Bouverie. (Tim Duggan, $30.) This book about Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy in the 1930s is most valuable as an examination of the often catastrophic consequences of failing to stand up to threats to freedom, whether at home or abroad. THE CROWDED HOUR: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century, by Clay Risen. (Scribner, $30.) This fast-paced narrative traces the rise of Roosevelt into a national figure and something of a legend against the backdrop of the emergence of the United States as a world power. THE ICE AT THE END OF THE WORLD: An Epic Journey Into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future, by Jon Gertner. (Random House, $28.) Gertner approaches Greenland via the explorers and scientists obsessed with it, then uses the country to illuminate the evidence for climate change. GRACE WILL LEAD US HOME: The Charleston Church Massacre and the Hard, Inspiring Journey to Forgiveness, by Jennifer Berry Hawes. (St. Martin's, $28.99.) This magisterial account of the 2015 hate crime and its aftermath, by a Pulitzer-winning local reporter, delivers a heart-rending portrait of life for the survivors and a powerful meditation on the meaning of mercy. MOSTLY DEAD THINGS, by Kristen Arnett. (Tin House, $25.) The "red mess" that Arnett's narrator finds in the family's taxidermy workshop early in this debut novel is not the inside of a deer - it's her dad, who has committed suicide. The book balances grief with humor and lush, visceral details. LANNY, by Max Porter. (Graywolf, $24.) In this rich, cacophonous novel of English village life - equal parts fairy tale, domestic drama and fable - a mischievous boy goes missing. NOUNS & VERBS: New and Selected Poems, by Campbell McGrath. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $24.99.) McGrath, who has spent decades exploring America and its appetites, is an especially exuberant poet; his work celebrates chain restaurants, rock music and the joyful raucous stupidity of pop culture. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 4, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

The title of the last poem in this retrospective is Campbell McGrath. It's not really autobiographical, however, and could have been put at the front of the book to indicate what this poet is all about. It's a road-atlas tour to places named Campbell, from Florida (McGrath's present homeland) to Alaska, with a southwest side-jaunt from the heartland (he grew up in Chicago, often the setting of his history-­tinted poems) to California and eventually, where the road ends, which is, of course, where the journey begins. It's hard to think of another contemporary poet who so reminds one of Whitman (a tutelary presence in many of these poems) and those later Whitmanians, Sandburg and Ginsberg, James Wright and Richard Hugo, in his frequently long-lined verses and rolling prose poems (a thick swatch of them in this five-part volume is like a festival of inspired short films) that habitually report on road trips and things that happen away from home, usually in North America, though Spain provided a particularly important youthful adventure. He has companions friends, wife, kids along for the rides, but he remains attentive to the ways places look and his interactions with natives and other travelers. McGrath's absorbing, amusing, and reflective traveling music entices us on the road yet again.--Ray Olson Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

With an open heart, a skeptical eye, and feet planted firmly in American soil (which holds "infant ferns," "bulldozed stockyards," and "pink cigarette lighters"), McGrath lets the world-from locusts in Manitoba ("an ancient horde of implacable charioteers") to decapitated icons in Rosarito Beach, Mexico-wash over him. Leading off with a book-length set of new poems, McGrath has culled from eight of his previous 10 collections in the four sections that follow. In a mix of long-line lyric poems, short poems and prose poems, McGrath inspects all that goes by. He locks eyes with a toad (whose eyes "are gold, brilliant and metallic,// like moon-lander foil hammered over robotic orbs") but can't do the same with a sea turtle, who is "like the barnacled hull of an overturned rowboat" with "sinewy stumps where the flippers should be" (they have been cut off for soup). Other poems include "Reading Emily Dickinson at Jiffy Lube" ("Praise images that leap from the mind like ninjas!") and the book's closer, "Campbell McGrath," a three-page piece built around a journey through towns named Campbell and McGrath ("All maps are useless now./ These final steps must be taken alone"). McGrath is intelligent company, his poems exhibiting a curious, sometimes furious mind tuning into the "literal noise of our culture," both violent and beautiful. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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