There are formalist poems about formalist poems, there are lyrical essays, heretical testaments, elegies, jokes, exuberant catalogs, and slippery narratives, all cities unto themselves. The ten-part “Poem That Needs No Introduction,” falling toward the close of the collection, starts, “Listen, I have endured so much bad art in my lifetime / that my brain actually throbs and pulses / in the manner of a 1960s comic book supervillain,” and as far as the “Vice President of Pants” has it, “this poetry gig / is like feeding chocolate donuts to a hungry tiger / or planting sunflowers on the moon.” Indeed, these poems are seething hungers. These poems drive drunk through Minneapolis in the name of Westerberg, pester Ginsberg till dawn in Chicago, safari with Lowell, troll Walmart, wake up on the lawn outside a McDonald’s. Wild and dreaming and rigorous, taking on a panoply of subject and structure, these poems wheel forth a voice fit for multitudes, for the world of poetry and the world as poetry, for what at once was and is, for what will come and cannot stay. Putting aside exhausting and exhausted talk of generational stylistics or paranoiac forecasts, one may nonetheless recognize McGrath’s Kingdom as a consolidation of major poetic force, a symphonic broadcast from the calamitous wonderland of a roving American self. Campbell McGrath has been called a master of monumental poems before, for cause fair enough-his debut full-length, Capitalism, and “The Bob Hope Poem” come to mind-but his ninth and newest book, In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys, positions him as a dead on equalizer.
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