Moongarden

By Anthony McCann

Like moonlight, McCann's attention gives weird clarity and an alien glow to post-industrial landscapes and human interiors. These poems are startling and irreverent, but also emotional and approachable. They uncivilize us into seeing the world as both ruin and possibility: "It was danger/ gave them life/ but damage/ makes us shine." Anthony McCann is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His books include I Heart Your Fate , Moongarden , and Father of Noise . He lives in Los Angeles.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1933517026
• ISBN13: 9781933517025
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: Wave Books
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.7" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Science Fills The Sky

Anthony McCann is a new name to me, and his book is a real pleasure to read. Often the absolute beauty of his little lines and sorties across the white page produces a sense of danger, the daring one often hears about in relation to contemporary poetry. Although it isn't a long book, it's a full one, and we get a sense of McCann's range which, although it's not very wide, comes with its own forcefield, so that a tiny phrase in one poem is amplified, or contraverted, in another a little bit further, so resonance is multiplied, and one reads MOONGARDEN with the sweet satisfaction of playing pool with a 20 pocket table. "Moongarden" itself is a sort of serial poem I guess, that keeps popping up through the volume, the way that Robert Duncan spread his "Passages" through THE BENDING OF THE BOW and other publications. In general McCann employs a lyric vocabulary with some of the mad wit and magic of the Surrealists; a Spanish note enlightens many of the loveliest of his creations, and once or twice an authentic Lorca vibe plows right through the poems like a mole tunnelling through the graded golf course lawns. He is capable to great surprise, and an opaque tenderness that lingers on the palate long after one has replaced the book on its shelf: "(Ellen knocks and reenters the poem Hello Ellen)" A few times I felt like he was taking the wind out of his own sails by the sheer gentleness of his approach. The "Enchanted Prince" section of "Moongarden, which brings us the President walking abstractedly at night, like "Abraham Lincoln Walks al Midnight," is so gorgeous it seems to encapsulate its subject in an admiring glaze of sensibility. "The president is dreaming ot the parkway again/ in his dream he cannot iron his clothes," writes McCann, and gradually we are determinedly shoved inside the sad soul of the man, pestered there and forced to identify with his grief, sort of the way "24" made a hero out of President David Palmer, by the sheer rearticulation of his identity ("For God's sake, David, you're the President." Does he miss a chance to write a political poem? I think so. I come away from "The Enchanted Prince" with a new appreciation for the ways in which, gee, it must be actually be sort of tough being Bush. Maybe the president here isn't supposed to be Bush, but the president of one of the South American republics McCann seems to gravitate to, in which case the feeling of a wasted opportunity still remains. However, we can't all be Neil Youngs, some of us must be Thom Yorkes. He's great anyhow.