Pity the poetry collection. That thin volume of poems, so easily lost on a crowded shelf, has to jockey not only with vastly proliferating print and media sources, but — even within the poetry world itself — with gorillas such as the New Yorker and the Atlantic, smaller literary magazines, collected works, and anthologies. If poetry occupies a small portion of the culture’s chaotic landscape, then the collection’s hold is by the fingertips.

A single poem does have its own integrity. But reading Campbell McGrath’s eighth collection, “Seven Notebooks,” (Ecco, 224 pages, $23.95), I was reminded that something is lost when a poem is plucked from its siblings. Many of the poems here have been previously published, but together they seem parts of a whole.

“Seven Notebooks” is best read in sequence. It is not an assortment of individual poems gathered together and put between covers, but nor is it a long poem, a memoir, a journal, or even a sequence or series (as the “seven notebooks” found within might suggest) — though it contains elements of all these genres. Like much of Mr. McGrath’s other verse, “Seven Notebooks” plays with convention. But this book has a more measured voice, governed by the metronome of passing days.

“Seven Notebooks” tracks the course of a single year, with each part more or less united by geography, theme, and poetic influence. Most of “Papyrus Notebook,” for example, takes place in Chicago and responds to Rilke; “Dawn Notebook” is set in New Jersey and includes long excerpts from Walt Whitman’s “Specimen Days.” (Mr. McGrath has a ranging and funny sensibility, and epigraphs include everyone from Basho to the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, whose turgid prose Mr. McGrath’s poetics subsequently puts to shame.) Most of the other poems take place in Miami, Mr. McGrath’s home, and many of them feature his wife, Elizabeth, and their two boys.

The memoir quality of “Seven Notebooks” is reinforced by the frequent prose poems, dated like journal entries. Some deal with quotidian reportage (“French people are having a party!”). Others showcase the poet’s probing mind circling precision (describing the sunrise: “kind of a stale ice-cream color now, French vanilla partly thawed then refrozen … “). At times these passages, like any journal entry, retain the fat of banality: “I should take a swim in the ocean! But school is in session — there is work to be done! Beautiful morning, sunny and cool … ” More often, though, they seem like the strings of balloons, tethering the poems to experience.

“January 8,” for example, an entry about Pablo Neruda and a running injury to Mr. McGrath’s plantar fascia, becomes “Ode to the Plantar Fascia.” Part homage to Neruda (author of such improbable tributes as “Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market”), part self-mockery, part admonition, this poem is a marvelous example of Mr. McGrath’s formal gifts, his genial humor, and his tremendous descriptive powers. The poem runs down the page in a thin column, like a tendon snapped by stanzas. A grand invocation — “Latin cousin to Achilles, / architectural upholder” — gives way to a mock-serious plea for forgiveness:

only now is your grievance
made known to me,
only now do I hear your cry,
unenviable membrane,
faithful attendant upon my every stride,
tender sole, antipodal to the soul …

Yet by the end the poem opens up, becoming a lighthearted but earnest political allegory about hubris: “only now do I learn to address you by name, / and the Empire / trembles.”

Several poems show flashes of Mr. McGrath’s characteristic documentarian impulse. He is a rapacious observer of the bloat and joys of America, of “waitresses / slaloming trays through the crowd, / a woman selling jewelry knit from optical fibers / lurid as stationary fireworks, pages / of a Carioca newspaper / turning … “

But in this collection, he focuses not on the expansive, all-consuming (American) universe, but rather on his own small individual sphere, perhaps tweaking his reputation as a latter-day Whitman. The section including Whitman’s quotations perversely contains a long series of haikus. Some are graceful and remote; others are delightfully silly: “Elizabeth asks, / what’s up with this haiku thing? / Pinecones in the sand.”

It’s all very sweet — until outside events make his focus seem myopic. “September 11” occurs during hurricane season: On the beach, the speaker catches sight of “a few other families picking through the flotsam, / eelgrass, purplish crenellated whelks … blue and yellow tops of soda bottles, / pink cigarette lighters, a toothbrush, a headless doll.”

These lines resonate, but scavenging a beach is a poor shadow of sifting through the wreckage of the towers, searching for human remains. The recourse to myth that follows — “later I met the gods emerging from a topaz-faceted sea, / their long hair flashing in the wind” — feels absurd in the face of what actually happened.

And Mr. McGrath knows it. All he has are images of the event — “already, distant and historicized, / like Matthew Brady’s Civil War photographs.” His poetry can’t do much in the face of this. Even Whitman’s “unique, coercive, actively embodied brand of empathy”could not bring Lincoln, nor the dead at Gettysburg, back to life, he acknowledges. One can feel the relief when his subject returns to his family a few pages later. “Tell me, oh master,” he asks the Tang dynasty writer Po Chü-I, “how shall I express my gratitude for the good fortune of this life?”

And life is good. The year grows darker, and shadows appear (literally, when a spot appears on an ultrasound of Elizabeth’s ovaries). But for the moment, middle age is comfortable. “Your wife is going to be just fine,” the doctor says. Death will come — “but not yet, not yet.” There is still too much to see and celebrate.

Ms. Thomas is a writer living in Berlin.