Amazon.com Review
A contrary poet friend once opined: there are people who don't
get Jorie Graham, and then there are people who pretend that they do.
Swarm finds the Pulitzer Prize winner operating at more than her usual level of opacity. Bumps and jumps, bizarre spacing, a certain fascination with center justification--this is poetry that sits as uneasily on the page as it does in the reader's mind. Not that there aren't moments of arresting lyricism in her eighth volume--notably, the title poem, in which a transatlantic phone call becomes a stirring (if oblique) meditation on separation and identity: "listen to / the long ocean between us / --the plastic cooling now--this tiny geometric swarm of / openings sending to you / no parts of me you've touched, no places where you've / gone--"
But all too often, the reader finds little that's this concrete to catch hold of: Graham seems to specialize in making the abstract more so. As in past volumes, the poet holds her gorgeous phrasing sternly in check. Here, however, Graham goes further, stripping away all of her art's usual trappings: image, music, the sensory world. "I have severely trimmed and cleared," she informs us, in "From the Reformation Journal," and indeed she has. "Uncertain readings are inserted silently," she adds, traveling away from the problematic first person even as an editor/interrogator both cross-examines and defends the result. In other poems, both God and the beloved figure as "radiant absence," and even a glance in the mirror--"that exit wound"--leads us away from rather toward ourselves.
A swarm, as Graham's notes rather immodestly inform us, is "a body of bees which ... leave the hive or main stock, gather in a compact mass or cluster, and fly off together in search of a new dwelling-place, under the guidance of a queen." Accordingly, these poems find her in the process of abandoning the tropes of mythology and religion, busily destabilizing the old forms in search of the new. Does Graham discover her new dwelling-place? "Explain," the imperative voice in Swarm repeatedly begs, and it's an entreaty worth heeding. Read these poems once, read them again, and you still may be no closer to an answer than you were before. --Mary Park
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
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.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
