In El Dorado, Peter Campion explores what it feels like to live in America right now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Splicing cell-phone chatter with translations of ancient poems, jump-cutting from traditional to invented forms, and turning his high-res lens on everything from box stores to trout streams to airport lounges, Campion renders both personal and collective experience with capacious and subtle skill.

Poem to Fire

Fast transparency that explodes the fuel and air
in the cylinder and shuts the intake valves and thrusts
down on the piston so the crankshaft spins and spins

you cut through all material that blocks your way
so fast that driving now past rushes and billboards
this pull to her could be your own impersonal presence

cloaked in the day to day of the malls and condos
all those wired sensors keeping on guard for you
except you flicker even inside the wet wall

where papillary muscle makes that sweet pulsation
in whatever room she's moving through this moment
under the cotton and the cool smoothness tinted blue

In this debut collection, Peter Campion explores both the gaps and the connections between the self and others. Like the "night blooming jasmine leaving its warm trace," these poems arise out of the dark. A man awakens in a hotel room to find the neighboring voices merging with the anguished souls of his nightmare. A woman living alone beside the ocean hears the words of the dead echo in the crashing waves. But if these poems convey a feeling of an enduring emptiness, they also offer us the most vital intimacies. In one poem, two lovers traverse the industrial sweep of strip malls and office towers to arrive at their rendezvous. In another, the seemingly simple memory of a mother playing with her sons at a park bridges a chasm of pain and loss.

With great poise, keen insight, and formal skill, Campion moves between shared experience and interior life in the shifting textures of Other People. Whether writing in rhymed couplets or free verse, he matches a deep understanding of the poetic tradition with his own imaginative feel for structure.

"The 'other people' of the title of this extraordinary book are fully alive in the life of its language; and so is the poet observing them, and observing himself, as one of them. The book is a sympathetic and unsentimental instrument of truth."—David Ferry

What do American poets mean when they talk about freedom? How can form help us understand questions about what shapes we want to give our poetic lives, and how much power we have to choose those shapes? For that matter, what do we even mean by we? In this collection of essays, Peter Campion gathers his thoughts on these questions and more to form an evolutionary history of the past century of American poetry.

            Through close readings of the great modernists, midcentury objectivists, late twentieth-century poets, his contemporaries, and more, Campion unearths an American poetic landscape that is subtler and more varied than most critics have allowed. He discovers commonalities among poets considered opposites, dramatizes how form and history are mutually entailing, and explores how the conventions of poetry, its inheritance, and its inventions sprang from the tensions of ordinary life. At its core, this is a book about poetic making, one that reveals how the best poets not only receive but understand and adapt what comes before them, reinterpreting the history of their art to create work that is, indeed, radical as reality.