Letter To An Imaginary Friend Parts Three and Four by Thomas McGrath (review)

Reviews Letter To An Imaginary Friend Parts Three and Four. By Thomas McGrath. (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1985. 115 pages, $16.00 cloth, $9.00 paper.) He is the most important American poet who can lay claim to the title “radical.” Though his locale is often “the West,” he is an American poet, whose work has received insufficient attention for many years. Readers who have followed Tom McGrath’s work since the publication of Parts I and II of Letter To An Imaginary Friend, now more than two decades ago, will find much that is familiar in this new, long-awaited volume. Not only has a good deal of it appeared earlier, in such volumes as Echoes Inside the Labyrinth, Passages Toward the Dark, and Waiting For The Angel, but the themes, the language, the metaphor, are all characteristic of—and vintage— McGrath. As is so often the case in poetry, however, the whole is a good deal more than the sum of its parts, and Parts III and IV of Letter are a fine addition to the corpus of McGrath’s work. Again we find here the combination of memory as the engine, so to speak, which drives this poem. The memory here is essentially based on two days in the life of the poem’s speaker—a day when revolutionary fervor gripped Lisbon, Portugal, as the Salazar dictatorship was overthrown, which in turn leads to memory of a Christmas in the childhood of the speaker, in “the little towns” of his birth, Sheldon, and neighboring Lisbon, North Dakota. Memory plays another role in this poem in that it evokes, as reference, or perhaps as allusion, figures and language from Parts I and II. Here we meet again Cal, the farmhand who was such an influential force in introducing the young speaker in the earlier volume to class struggle and to sexuality, to appropriate loyalty and love;we find lines which in the earlier poem are spoken by “Peets,” the speaker’s landlord while he is at Louisiana State University (“Don’t go barefoot to a ‘snake stompin’” is one such reference) and to Mack, the working-class, water-front leader from whom the speaker in I and II learned so much, and to other figures and events. Thus, Parts III and IV recall for us the material of I and II in deliberate ways which make all of Letter one single poem. Indeed, in his introduction to this volume, McGrath writes, and quite rightly so: “As someone has pointed out, I have been working on only one poem throughout all my work.” In this regard, as in so many others, McGrath shares something with the inescapable poet for all American poets, Walt Whitman. 230 Western American Literature The most important single difference I have found between Parts I and II of Letter and Parts III and IV is in tone. This poem is— elegiac, I suppose, is the word I want. McGrath here seems to see much more the end of things than was the case. This has been true of much of his recent poetry, even in shorter pieces, as, perhaps, is appropriate for a poet who has now behind him so many more years than did the writer of Parts I and II. The major portion of Part IV, as a matter of fact, has to do with a kind of speaker’s “Himmelfahrt ,” a trip to heaven, or really the several heavens which derive from, as McGrath’s introduction has it, Kachina mythology from the Hopi: “Accord­ ing to the Hopi we now live in Tuwaqachi, the Fourth World, but we will soon enter Saquasohuh, the Fifth World, which will be much better.” The speaker of the poem enters this fifth world, and travels as well through nine heavens by the end of the poem—all of these part of a dream remembered, (or, per­ haps, created) as the man in Lisbon, Portugal, remembers the child in Sheldon, North Dakota, falling asleep on the way home from the Christmas celebration. The effect of this travel through the heavens and the worlds is the kind of sense of endings I have mentioned, though, at...