ROAD ATLAS

This fourth collection by the much-awarded (and this-round MacArthur grant recipient) Florida International University creative-writing professor continues the sense (from Spring Comes to Chicago and the other books) that McGrath fancies himself working a genre all his own: prose riffs that sometimes tell little stories but are not bound by the conventions of narrative. Except for some extra-long-line poems in the C.K.Williams vein, McGrath spares us the pretense of poetic lines; despite his imagistic language, his paragraphs seldom sound especially lyrical; nor do they flow on particularly poetic rhythms. Mostly, they seem like notebook jottings for a larger project—a memoir or a travelogue. “Prose Poem,” which is the closest thing here to an ars poetica, relies on an extended metaphor of “formal fields” and the varieties of farming types. And McGrath’s subsequent prose passages do little to clear matters up. Many of his pieces concern travel: “Plums,” a typical example, recalls a hill in Nebraska and ends with the Whitmanesque echo: “I was there. I bore witness to that moment.” McGrath considers moments like this far more significant than his readers will, who might simply be envious of his itinerary: he remembers a superb meal in Tunis, a festival in Brazil, a swim off a Gulf Coast island, a one-night stand in Amsterdam, his brother’s wedding in Las Vegas, and a family trip to Naples. For all his hipster, “on the road” posing, McGrath goes soft when it comes to his sons, whom he quotes for cutesy effect. And his political commentary is best exhibited in the pretentiously titled “Capitalist Poem #42,” which lists all that his family buys at Costco, before declaring it the “Grand Canyon of commodities.” McGrath wants us to share his enthusiasm for the “freedom and speed” of the open road, but these sluggish prose pieces and poems barely reach 55.