Title: American noise
First published: 1993
Description: 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.
Subjects: New York Times reviewed, Poetry (poetic works by one author)
LC classification: PS3563.C3658 A84 1993