"XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century"

XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century by Campbell McGrath

Pages: 266 Genre: poetry

Rating: 3.5 Stars

This collection of poems are each from the point of view of one subject for each year of the 20th Century. It's an ambitious project, and in most ways is quite good.

Unfortunately, I'm neither a history nor a poetry girl, which puts me at a major disadvantage for this book. Don't get me wrong: I liked it. It was good, and McGrath clearly put in the effort. But a lot of it fell flat for me personally.

The subjects that he chose to be, for the lack of a better phrase, the main characters, was almost more interesting that some of the poems. It felt like the book would've benefitted from an intro paragraph telling me his thought process, because it's not like these were all big names in world (well, European and American, mostly) history. That's not a criticism, to be clear. Just an observation, and I'd love to know why some of these subjects were chosen. My favorite poems were often the ones with non-human speakers, as that was giving a unique spotlight on history. It just felt a little random.

On a similar note, I probably would've benefitted from reading a history textbook before going through these poems. I could probably do well to learn a bit more about history, but I think a book like this should be able to stand on its own and be its own narrative without me knowing a lot of history beforehand.

This is especially true for the poems that were more info-dumps than poetry. Now, I'm not a poetry girl, so I'm not going to pretend I know what makes a poem Good or Bad. But sometimes it felt like I was just reading a collection of facts instead of a piece of creative writing. Honestly, there were times it seemed like McGrath cared more about proving how smart he was instead of creating a story.

The concept was cool, and I mostly enjoyed the poems. It was just maybe not my thing. Someone who knows more about either history or poetry might like it more; it seemed like a lot of the book was just going over my head.