Campbell McGrath has written six books of poems. Of these, Spring Comes to Chicago (1996), Road Atlas (1999), and Florida Poems (2002) should not be missed by poetry readers, and if on reading these, you want more of McGrath, there’s Pax Atomica.

If you treasure the poems of Whitman, if you like prose poems in the Hebraic tradition, or if you enjoy solving crossword puzzles, then you might take a look at “Zeugma,” in Pax Atomica.

McGrath (born, 1962) has won several prizes including the MacArthur “genius” award, but one should not hold the prizes against him. He is rare among recipients of poetry awards, in that he deserves the prizes. His poems are intense, and packed with specificity. “Zeugma” is an ingenious poem. I have selected it to review because it was the most difficult to decipher and resisted attempts to decode it, and because it yielded unexpected surprises with each attempt.

The word zeugma, which literally means linking together, is a rhetorical device that may be used to link two disparate situations. One example is when different subjects or objects share a single verb.

At the simplest level, the word zeugma connects artist to artifact, the plow to the ox, the conqueror to the conquered…. Examples from different eras and epochs are given in the poem to suggest a cyclical view of history. The conflicts (“agons”) recur whether in the Andes, or in Iraq as parallels events. The cunning corridors of Time throw up these paradigms particularly in the “Fertile Crescent,” the Middle East.

On the next day, great Nineveh, abandoned:

kings, seneschals, satraps, jesters, fletchers, peltasts, potters,

priestly & noble classes- vanished conjointly into equitable oblivion, weaver & wool, smith & tool,
queen & fool. So much for the Assyrians
Ink, a luxury, so no text but wind-scoured stone remain to help us/ recall them, our contemporary ignorance

hardly less monumental than Xenophon’s self-serving chronicle,

scene by scene inventing ancient history.

Green no longer, that Fertile Crescent, mislabeled by an entranced human stab at metaphoric order.

Now, in our own times, the voice of the people (“vox populi”) has been mistaken for the voice of the angels (“vox angelica”). McGrath’s poem makes us ask: Is our rhetoric possibly no different from that of Xenephon’s self-serving and fictitious record of his campaign along the Tigris?

McGrath uses zeugma to show that civilization may be viewed as going from: a to z, or from z to a. The odd-numbered lines of the poem begin with “a” and progress to “z”, and the even-numbered lines go from z to a. (The English alphabet has 26 letters; so, the poem is 52 lines long.) This alternation of the backward and the forward progressions are yoked to the idea that civilization is boustrophedonic (meaning to say, it alternates between: writing from the right side to the left- as in Arabic script- and, writing from the left side to the right- as in English script).

While reading “Zeugma,” same as when doing a crossword puzzle, it is necessary to take frequent breaks so as to avoid mental fatigue. The reward will be what the philosopher called, “a disinterested interest.”

(The Gulf War may be inflammatory to some, but in the poem, it is not. Actually, a cyclical view of history has a calming and sobering effect).

On Easter Sunday, I asked a gifted schoolteacher, to sit with me, so that we could each consult a dictionary and decipher “Zeugma” lexically. During our reading, I called out frequently, “Mental fatigue!” Later, I wrote to 16 persons for their response to the poem. Of these five responded, as given here.

David Bly (high school teacher): “‘Zeugma’ revives the notion that the language of poetry is yoked to history, as well as to lost meanings. It brings to mind Ezra Pound’s Cantos.”

Rosalyn Mascott (an English woman): “History repeats itself.”

Eva Marer (freelance writer): “This is a complex and difficult poem, yoked to the history of the Middle East.”

Vince Tolve (lawyer): “History suggests: order, progress and purpose, and consequently appears to be shallow, misleading and false. Historical conflicts rise out of something intrinsic and endemic in man.”

Richard Stern (“writer’s writer,” prize-winning novelist, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters) wrote back: “Campbell McGrath was a student of mine, and I take pride in his many accomplishments. I’ve seen him a bit in recent years- he taught here (University of Chicago) 3 or 4 years ago- and I have enjoyed his very pleasant company. If I have criticism to make of any of my student’s work, I will not make it publicly. Suffice (it) to say that there are other poems of Campbell’s which mean more to me than ‘Zeugma.’”

Pax Atomica, Poems, by Campbell McGrath (HarperCollins, NY, 2004)