Letter to an Imaginary Friend: Parts I-IV
Every time McGrath (1916^-90) returns to the northern Great Plains upon which he was born, his magnum opus, all four parts of which are here gathered together for the first time, comes to life. The incidents and the landscape of his early life are the most vivid and meaningful for McGrath, and he is clear and concrete when he describes them. The strength of these passages suggests that theLetteras a whole, a personal epic in the tradition inaugurated by Wordsworth'sPrelude, would be better had McGrath stuck to the actual circumstances of his own life. But he avoids the specifics of his later life and fritters away too much of the big poem playing word games ala James Joyce and spouting radical political sentiments for it to be consistently engrossing. Still,Letterat its best is one of the most readable long modernist poems, far more appealing than, say, either Pound'sCantosor Williams'Paterson.Ray Olson--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.