Trying to reconstitute and renew the soured American Dream, Thomas McGrath hopes to move, in life as well as in art, for he is a political man, "beyond history to Origin / To build that Legend where all journies [sic] are one / where Identity / Exists / where speech becomes song." This means he must replace the historical and diseased idea of manifest destiny, individual and national, which gave us Los Angeles, with the communal myth of unitary voyages that end by bringing us together. Unhappily McGrath succeeds no better than other politicians at this hard task, but not, unlike those others, for want of sincerity or passionate devotion. No, [Letter to an Imaginary Friend] is not hypocritical, just very hard to write; for, having chosen the autobiographical form, the poet must, given his theme, make his life the nation's, make us believe that "North Dakota [his boyhood home] is / Everywhere...