Kategoria BISAC: Poetry >> Epic

"America's epic is the odyssey of appetite," Campbell McGrath declares, and these poems track those defining hungers across a social landscape by turns "grave, risible, amazing, banal," cataloging the "vortex of images in a ruined theater the culture comes to resemble," from Rocky and Bullwinkle to "Blue Angels rampant on a field of static, / anthem and flag descending to darkness." In terza rima meditations, rock-and-roll elegies, and abecedarian lyrics, Pax Atomica documents the tangled romance between self and society ("in which / the melody's ampersand ensnares us") in ways...

Family and Children

With Kit, Age Seven, at the Beach

We would climb the highest dune,

from there to gaze and come down:

the ocean was performing;

we contributed our climb.

Waves leapfrogged and came

straight out of the storm.

What should our gaze mean?

Kit waited for me to decide.

Standing on such a hill,

what would you tell your child?

That was an absolute vista.

Those waves raced far, and cold.

"How far could you swim, Daddy,

in such a storm?"

"As far as was needed," I said,

and as I talked, I swam.

Passing Remark

In...

Arguably the greatest Greek lyric poet, Pindar (518-438 B.C.) was a controversial figure in fifth-century Greece--a conservative Boiotian aristocrat who studied in Athens and a writer on physical prowess whose interest in the Games was largely philosophical. Pindar's Epinician Odes--choral songs extolling victories in the Games at Olympia, Delphi, Nemea and Korinth--cover the whole spectrum of the Greek moral order, from earthly competition to fate and mythology. But in C....