For more than 30 years Thomas McGrath has held a special place among American poets. His lyric and rhapsodic strengths are unequalled. His use of rhetoric and of the sonorities of poetic speech have been compared to Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas. McGrath's work has become more significant in recent years, as a new generation of pets with intense political concerns have discovered his work. McGrath's sense of "practical poesie"--of poetry involved in...