Juvenalia - Paperback

by Reid McGrath (Author)

There is, when you leave the pomp and frenzy of New York City, a quietly rugged and surprisingly magnificent beauty that overwhelms the landscape of the Hudson Valley. This beauty and the voice of emerging poet Reid McGrath are one and the same. Never have I read verse that so quintessentially represents the new and emerging American poet.

-Evan Mantyk, poet and editor of The Society of Classical Poets.

Reid's poems are full of raw energy, linguistic power, and remarkable, strong phrases that spill over everywhere. His art, like rock, is hard and durable; its truths are blunt; Winslow Homer is a kindred spirit in that bleak landscape. His world, indeed, at times, is onerous, like karst escarpments, easy to be scraped. It is sincere as mountains and as staid. His lines are sober, somber, serious, like rushing rivers, not easy to wade; they run the gamut, calm to furious. His verbal structures seem like mighty walls, or waterfalls of hardy howls and bawls.

-Bruce Dale Wise, poet.

Into the sterile, virtual artifice of our disconnected modern world walks the farmer-poet, Reid McGrath, tracking fertile loam from his chore boots. Direct, pithy, form-conscious, and without guile, Reid's poetry embraces the land on which he works and dwells and occasionally glances toward infinity. Boots on the ground, soul in the sky: this book may be just the nourishment needed by a culture starving for tangible reality and truth.

-Amy Foreman, poet.