Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition

(Paperback)

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Who finds this body
Be it known
My name is George Shannon
& I bequeath my remains
To seed this land
With American bones.

From the inimitable Campbell McGrath comes an epic poem of George Shannon, the youngest member of the Lewis and Clark expedition, who wandered the prairie alone for sixteen days. Spinning a tale of adventure and wonderment, McGrath gives voice to Shannon's lost weeks in the wilderness, a harrowing journey of survival and discovery.

With Shannon, McGrath has created both a thrilling narrative that rises from the once vast, lonely spaces of the American west and a compelling portrait of that now ineradicably altered landscapethen unmapped, wild yet bounteous, teeming with buffalo and home to native peoplesthat continues to haunt the American imagination.

Reviews

"A luminescent narrative...the stanza spacing, the line breaks and the quiet rhythms of Shannon's speech ...suggest the continent's vastness...Shannon's understated lyricism -- the apprehension of nature before the onset of self-consciousness...reflects heightened maturity in McGrath's work." -- Kansas City Star

"McGrath takes us back to a pivotal point in United States history through the curious eyes of an unsung hero. ['Shannon' is] an unexpected story and a gem of a book." -- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"A meditation on a new, westering nation's discovery of its own inestimable riches....Surely, the sort of task McGrath undertakes here represents one of literature's profoundest pleasures. A poet tirelessly digs up something buried by days, years, centuries. And then he holds it to the light." -- Washington Post

Author Bio

Campbell McGraths previous collections are Capitalism, American Noise, Spring Comes to Chicago, Road Atlas, Florida Poems, and Pax Atomica. His awards include the Kingsley Tufts Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. He teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami.