Imagine yourself wandering lost on the high plains of Nebraska and South Dakota with no companions and nothing but your wits to sustain you. Your only provisions are whatever you can kill or gather, and though you have a rifle to hunt game, you have no more than a few bullets. How long would you survive? What would you do to survive? Worse, what if the year were 1804, long before the advent of highways, gas stations, and nationwide cellular phone coverage?

My answers would probably be something along the lines of, “Not long”, “I have no idea”, and “What? No cell phone?”

Indeed, that sort of narrative is not one you would typically associate with poetry. Indeed, it sounds like the plot of a dime-store novel or an adventure story that might appear in the pages of Boy’s Life. Yet, the scenario of wandering lost in a land of apparent plenty without any food, which forms the framework for Campbell McGrath’s latest book, is no fiction. Rather, it is 16 days in the life of George Shannon, who was, historically, the youngest member of the Corps of Discovery that was led by Meriweather Lewis and William Clark.

Nevertheless, like Walt Whitman gazing at the Brooklyn Ferry or Hart Crane studying the contours of the Brooklyn Bridge, Campbell McGrath has taken a footnote of American history and crafted a poem that speaks to the contradictory impulses of our collective history in one of the most impressive displays of dramatic monologue I’ve ever seen.

The poem, which is over 100 pages in length and separated into a section for each day of Shannon’s wandering, is framed by three entries taken directly from the journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The first two of these entries provide us with the situation: in August of 1804, as the expedition continues its ascent of the Missouri river into Sioux territory, George Shannon, the narrator for the bulk of the poem, leaves the expedition party in search of two loose horses.

Historically, there is no record of the following days, so the remainder of the poem, excepting the final journal entry from William Clark and the insightful Afterword from McGrath, is a fiction that McGrath provides us by combining his painstakingly thorough research with a remarkable ear for style, tone, and syntax. Indeed, from the very first free verse lines, we are taken into the verisimilitude of this character and the “foreign” landscape of possibility that he inhabits:

It is a fine & open country in every aspect hereabouts.
The very prairie, grassland thickets
Or brakes along the several streams with elk
& deer largely therein.   (9)

Instantly, we recognize that the diction is not our own. Rather, these are the speech patterns of a particular man who traveled these prairies before any other English-speaking man. Throughout the entirety of the poem, McGrath never allows a false-step to creep into Shannon’s syntax or thought; the illusion is both effective and maintained. Of course, in lesser hands, this strategy might have produced a two-dimensional caricature focused on nothing other than survival or mindless jingoism. However, McGrath’s illusion is so successful that, on my first read, I was taken aback by what remains unsaid in the narrative: that the Lewis and Clark expedition, though a stunning feat of courage, began to open the West for settlements that were — ultimately — responsible for genocide.

Yet, on closer inspection, portents of the future that George Shannon could not have known during the lyric moments of this poem are sprinkled throughout, including this brief reflection on an earlier visit with the Omaha:

They are much reduced by the small pox
The Maha, & set upon
In said weakness by their fellows.
Worse luck that Capt. Lewis did intend
To inoculate these Indians against it
Only to find the vaccine spoiled in transit — (32)

Here, in characteristic language, McGrath points us to our own knowledge of history. Though the Omaha, of course, survive the plague of small pox, the mere mention of that particular disease summons less cooperative moments in our nation’s history to mind.

In fact, Shannon, as imagined by McGrath, is remarkably prescient to the plight that Native Americans will face. They, naturally, still constitute a foreign “other” to Shannon, so how could McGrath have written this character otherwise without striking an utterly false note? Nevertheless, as Shannon continues to wander the high plains near the Missouri River, his solitary thoughts often turn toward Native Americans and their impending lot:

Still I wish the Indians would embrace [the Law]
For the Law might serve to shield them better
Than the Word of Jesus
Which relies for its vitality
Upon the goodness in men’s hearts
While the Law has got
The U.S. Army to enforce it.  (59-60)

This stanza, like many others, has the unnerving quality of listening to a psychic who happens to be right. Shannon points us toward our own history and his future. Frequently, as when he imagines that Meriweather Lewis, William Clark, or even George Shannon himself could be president, he predicts wrongly, but the allure of possibility and the seeming vastness of the space in which he is lost never seems far from his mind.

In many ways, such contradictions as those vast possibilities and their moral and physical price are what this book — aside from the ripping adventure story — is about. Indeed, Shannon’s situation seems to capture these contradictions precisely:

In a land of plenty
I travel hungry.

In a country of herds
I wander alone.

On a journey of discovery
I am the lost.  (69-70)

Such lyricism, which also speaks poignantly to our contemporary American culture, abounds throughout the book. In fact, as the narrator struggles with hunger, the syntax shifts, and his thoughts drift to family, to religion, to Christian metaphysics, and to the natural world surrounding him, inhibitions seem to fall away. And slowly, a sort of delirium (or ennui) slips through the reasoned and otherwise balanced syntax.

At key moments, as when the exhausted Shannon is surrounded by a herd of buffalo, the lines themselves dissolve and words float across the page and into each other to replicate the natural world and the troubled mind of the wandering narrator. Such moments, though occasionally overwrought, provide respites from the narrative and its usual voice, as well as insight into the otherness of the “natural” world. More, such sections seem to delineate the boundaries of what, precisely, civilization entails — even as Shannon contemplates founding his own settlement.

For example, at a point where Shannon has set up a camp and given up his search for the slim hope that a supply boat will pass up the Missouri, he wakes to find himself covered with ants, and rather than panicking (as I imagine a healthy person would), he imagines himself as an Ant-God and Ant-Devil before observing:

The ant is a model citizen, all things considered.
They would be welcome as settlers
In Shannontown
If they could afford the mark-up. (95)

Here, even in the midst of his slight delirium the economic rationale for his exploratory mission with Lewis and Clark is not lost on him, nor is the tension between the civilizing impulse and the natural world.  Like the Native Americans, alas, one suspects that the ants would not be able to afford the mark up.

Finally, I’d like to assure you that I’ve not done the book justice. There are countless sections I’ve marked as lovely and moving that I simply could not show you. No small review could.

This near epic of exploration and loss bring us into the life of a 19th-century man for a few pivotal days. We witness his loves, his family, his evaluation of himself and how he interacts with his peers, as well as his (and America’s) relationship to newly purchased lands, their wildlife, and their people, and ultimately, history itself. More, McGrath manages this material and its contradictions to posit numerous questions that resonate in our collective past as well as our collective present. It is a wildly ambitious book that succeeds in its ambition.

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