Swarm: Poems - Hardcover

Graham, Jorie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0880016957 ISBN 13: 9780880016957

Publisher: Ecco, 1999

Synopsis

With Swarm, her first new collection since The Errancy, Pulitzer Prize-winner Jorie Graham has given us a book-length sequence of poems stunning in its sober encounter with destiny, eros, and law. The narrator, at times almost vertigo-ridden by the problem of who is addressed-whom there still is to address-negotiates passionately with those powers human beings feel themselves to be "underneath": God, matter, law, custom, the force of love.

To "swarm" is to leave an originating organism'a hive, a home country, a stable sense of one's body, a stable hierarchy of values -- in an attempt, by coming apart, to found a new form that will hold. The Roman Empire, its distillation in the Forum's remains, the Romantic imagination of that buried past ("underneath"), as well as the collapse of the erotic border between lovers' bodies, are persistent metaphors for the destabilization and reformation of the idea and sensation of personhood.

The "first" person and "enjambment" are characters in this book, as are the fragment, the gap, the sentence. And everywhere lovers seek to find the borders that must break as well as those that must at all cost hold. Clytemnestra await-ing Agamemnon, Calypso veiling Ulysses, Daphne accepting Apollo -- a variety of mythological characters reappear here, ea-ger to plead their stories into sense, desper-ate for some insight into the buried justice of natural law.

About this title

About the Author

Jorie Graham is the author of fourteen collections of poems. She has been widely translated and has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Forward Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the International Nonino Prize. She lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Harvard University.

Reviews

If Graham's last book, The Errancy (1997), was a self-consciously Eliotic attempt to find moral structure that came up frustrated, then Swarm is the plague that follows. And if the previous book was watched over by the many angels of its titles, this seventh collection is presided over by the peculiar Western fusion of classical drama and a Judeo-Christian God: "At the front end, the meanwhile: God's laughter./ Are you still waiting for the true story? (God's laughter)/ The difference between what is and could be? (God's laughter)/ In this dance the people do not move." The flap copy and end notes together indicate that the collection is to be read as a book-length sequence of poems, one which calls on Eurydice, Calypso, Daphne and Eve as masks through which the poet again questions the possibility of morality, this time coming down firmly on the side of fate in the face of law: "To be told best not to touch./ To touch./ For the farewell of it./ And the further replication./ And the atom/ saturated with situation." The pun on "atom," along with a forbidding quality to many of the love poems here, make the book feel like an elaborate justification for the abandonment of an unnamed Eden or a significant other. Numerous poems are titled "Underneath" and interrogate, with Graham's characteristic energy, various forms of self-suppression and dissolution--through text, sex, violence and history. Graham is such a good writer that she at times attains the harsh, Sophoclean abstraction of the "I" she seems to be aiming for, but she can't quite make the indiscretions of that "I" take on the cumulative force of the figures she uses to back it. Readers will revel in Graham's sharply fragmentary powers of description, but the stakes are high enough here that some will wonder whether the poems' emotional permutations spring from a desire for truth or for self-validation. Poetry Book Club Main Selection. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Swarm marks a stylistic change for Graham, whose work over the last two decades has garnered a Pulitzer Prize, favorable comparisons to Wallace Stevens, and other accolades. While her concerns remain metaphysical and ontological and her perspective still unapologetically solipsistic, the richly expansive lines that characterized her poems as recently as The Errancy (LJ 6/15/97) have given way to a fragmented minimalism, to feints and half-steps constricted by the imperative mood ("Interrupt belief./ Write downhope./ Move lips in sleep./ Widen"), broken by parentheticals and extended spacings, thinned by abstraction, or muted with a self-conscious reverence toward an unnamed (God? the poet herself?) "you." These pieces are nothing if not prayers, but prayers meant to echo only within the chancel of the subject's mind, so that to read them is to feel like an eavesdropper. In her notes, Graham acknowledges the influence of experimental poets like Susan Howe and Michael Palmer, but her appropriation of postmodern techniques creates a surface out of synch with the spiritual--almost quaintly Miltonic--ambitions glimmering at the center of these poems.
-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

from The Reformation Journal

The wisdom I have heretofore trusted was cowardice, the leaper.

I am not lying. There is no lying in me,

I surrender myself like the sinking ship,

a burning wreck from which the depths will get theirs when the heights have gotten theirs.

My throat is an open grave. I hide my face.

I have reduced all to lower case.

I have crossed out passages.

I have severely trimmed and cleared.

Locations are omitted.

Uncertain readings are inserted silently.

Abbreviations silently expanded.

A "he" referring to God may be capitalized or not.

(is crying now)          show me

is crying now            (what's wrong)

in a strange tree    of atoms    of

too few            more         no wonder

Give me the glassy ripeness

Give me the glassy ripeness in failure

Give me the atom laying its question at the bottom of nature

Send word                                    Clear fields

Make formal event                                 Walk

                                        Turn back

Reduce all to lower case        Have reduced all

Cross out passages             Have inserted silently

is there a name for?

glassy ripeness

in failure

born and raised

and you?

(go back)                        (need more)

having lived it               leaves it possible

fear    lamentation    shame    ruin    believe    me

explain      given to

explain      born of

Absence is odious                        to God

I'm asking

Unseen unseen                      the treasure unperceived

Unless you compare            the treasure may be lost

Oh my beloved                    I'm asking

More atoms, more days, the noise of the sparrows, of the universals

Yet colder here now than in

the atom still there at the bottom of nature

that we be founded on infinite smallness

which occasions incorruption or immortality"

(incorruption because already as little as it can be)

(escape square, wasted square, safety square, hopeless square)

"to all except anguish the mind soon adjusts"

have reduced, have trimmed, have cleared, have omitted

have      abbreviations      silently      expanded

to what               avail

explain       asks to be followed

explain       remains to be seen

 

Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0880016957
• ISBN 13: 9780880016957
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128