Campbell McGrath’s Seven Notebooks (2008) is a compilation of seven different sections with each having their own individual topic, examples including McGrath’s family life, thoughts on language and art, notions of civilization, social changes and McGrath’s personal enjoyment towards the positive effects and meaning which poetry can provide to an individual. Each section relies upon a variety of poetic forms and brings a nimble spontaneity to the collection. A few pages possibly with full paragraph prose poems, but then followed by a series of minimalist haiku, the juxtaposition suggesting an impromptu approach to the writing and places an emphasis upon the liveliness of poetic words rather than aesthetic refinement-- not unlike a journal, or blog if you will. To add another structure to the collection, there are constant allusions to the particular season in which each ‘notebook’ was composed and the collection chronoligically follows the course of one complete year, the first notebook beginning in January and then the last taking the reader into the following December.

While the predominant form of Seven Notebooks is Asian based, his acknowledged influences also include the American breadth of Whitman‘s invocations, the private exultance of Rilke and the surreal exoticism of Neruda. However, rather than attempting to match the extremes of these literary giants, McGrath’s nods are balanced through the banality of his day to day existence. While Rilke faced his mystical torture and Neruda observed the horrors of the twentieth century, McGrath offers more subdued versions that are proportionate to a basic middle class family life, but still conscious of the difficulties occurring throughout the world and the inevitable threats that face anyone’s existence, regardless of how lucky or how privileged their background. And this further reflects the Asian use of the quotidian for subject matter, with many of the poems evolving from common day to day occurrences such as blueberry picking, watching the sunrise, attending to dishes or observing surfers on the beach. Unlike Western art, this is an effort to downplay the extremes of our passions to identify and recognize what’s unique to the everyday.

The references to McGrath’s influences and the traditions are perhaps too obvious to be appreciated at an artistic level. He doesn’t attempt to match their gestures, nor attempt to bring something new to their forms, so what is left is an amount of educational intent in the writing. To that, McGrath even relies upon quotes from other poets and thinkers between his poems, which to me suggests a particular audience. The greater strength in his writing though is the appealing tone, which allows a reader to not just recognize, but share in McGrath’s love for poetry and how it can be intimately incorporated into a person’s life. Readers and writers don’t live vicariously through literature, they use literature to conceptualize, augment, understand, console, expand, challenge, document and enrich whatever material life they may be living. And when a reader can experience firsthand the how and why McGrath does this in his own life, with a pure delight that is void of ostentation or pretense, the exuberance becomes contagiously welcome.