Longshot O’Leary Counsels Direct Action

Thomas McGrath

This collection is a sampler of Thomas McGrath’s best short poems from the 1940s to the 1970s edited by Fred Whitehead.  It is modeled after an earlier pamphlet, Longshot O’Leary’s Book of Practical Poetry, published shortly after the Second World War. 

Born in 1916, the oldest child of six in a North Dakota farm family, McGrath graduated from college in 1939 and served in the Army in the Aleutians during World War Two.  He returned to complete a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford in 1948.  Already a published poet, he taught at Los Angeles State College between 1951 and 1954, when he was fired following his hostile testimony at a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing in 1953.  He founded and edited the magazine Crazy Horse and resumed teaching at Moorhead State University in Minnesota in 1962.  McGrath’s most important collections include his selected poems, Movie at the End of the World (1972), and his long poem, Letter to an Imaginary Friend (1997).

“McGrath then is a western American, a radical, a modern and “postmodern,” witty, angry, important, as yet neglected poet. Most who know his work believe that his importance in the body of recent American poetry will continue to grow, especially as additional parts of Letter to an Imaginary Friend become available in book form.”—Frederick C. Stern

1.
God love you now, if no one else will ever,
Corpse in the paddy, or dead on a high hill
In the fine and ruinous summer of a war
You never wanted.  All your false flags were
Of bravery and ignorance, like grade school maps:
Colors of countries you would never see—
Until that weekend in eternity
When, laughing, well armed, perfectly ready to kill
The world and your brother, the safe commanders sent
You into your future.  Oh, dead on a hill,
Dead in a paddy, leeched and tumbled to
A tomb of footnotes.  We mourn a changeling: you:
Handshelled to poverty and drummed to war
By distinguished masters whom you never knew.
             —from “Ode for the American Dead in Asia”

5½ x 8½ inches • 32 pages • ISBN 0-931122-28-7 • $2.00