The Movie At The End Of The World, is a collection of poems written over the past three decades or so that the author wishes to preserve for a contemporary audience. As Franklin Brainard recently pointed out in his review of this book in The Minnesota Daily, McGrath could have profited greatly by "trimming" the contents, by weeding out the less significant poems and thereby giving the reader a leaner, but stronger, collection in terms of the over-all result. But I must agree further with Brainard's assessment that if one reads the book from cover to cover and judges it as a book, the results will be very rewarding. McGrath's efforts over this long span of time reveal a highly accomplished poet, a craftsman of hitherto unrecognized, but considerable, ability—whose reputation is confirmed as among those ten or twelve American poets writing today who should be considered "major" in import and influence. But what of the poems?… I can refer the reader to two poems which rendered my reading well. McGrath is above all an experimenter; he writes free verse as much as tried-and-true forms, such as the sonnet, the sestina and so forth. The poems in Movie, however, are written mostly in forms peculiar to McGrath's own personal idiom, the structure of which is more often than not developed by the message and import of the given poem. Such would be the poem, "A Warrant For Pablo Neruda"….

Another poem—"Obituary"—is very short, only five lines, yet it shows the "Dakota experience" very well, reminding the reader of what McGrath means when he says of his North Dakota upbringing that, wherever he went and whatever he did after leaving North Dakota as a young man, he found "North Dakota is everywhere"—he could not escape it, even if he had wanted to forget it, to bury it along with a thousand other things in his past. Naturally, the poet's past pervades this book—it is a personal history rich with experiences not always explained, but revealed in essence throughout a reading of this collection. And it is in "Obituary" that this rich awareness of the past is brought out so well….

Mention should also be made of McGrath's long epic poem, Letter To An Imaginary Friend, Parts One and Two; while it is not my purpose here to examine Letter, I highly recommend it as essential reading to anyone who wishes to understand one of the most significant long poems in recent American literary history, as well as the moving force—the personal ethos—of one of the most important poets now writing. (p. 59)