McGrath is best known for his great long-poem Letter to an Imaginary Friend, a work whose epic regional, artistic, and political sweep has extremely affected American poetry. [The poems in Open Songs: Sixty Short Poems] lack the room McGrath sometimes needs to sweep perceptive powers about him, the sense of history that makes him great. They are valuable because they contain the lesson of how a good poet slowly and deliberately fashions the detail of a poetic world, strand by strand, word by word.

John Jacob, in a review of "Open Songs: Sixty Short Poems," in Booklist (reprinted by permission of the American Library Association; copyright © 1978 by the American Library Association), Vol. 74, No. 16, April 15, 1978, p. 1319.