Thomas McGrath is an older poet … and the astonishing document of his life, Letter to an Imaginary Friend, illuminates much of what has been forgotten by this generation. Parts I and II of what promises to be an unending chronicle are presented here in 214 wide pages. This project is astonishing, and I find it hard to believe so little attention has been drawn to it…. McGrath's Letter is an incessant, grieving lyric, obsessive and polemical, euphoric and bereaved. The long six-stress line he has chosen acts as an incantation; lines are broken up, dispersed, orchestrated…. It is the narrative of a joyous, terrible journey, during which the poet, like Jacob, finds himself abandoned and blessed.

Throughout, the resonance of personal history is drowned out by the larger concerns of American life during the Depression and World War II. As a boy from a desolate farm in North Dakota...