Customer Reviews

Swarm

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Graham's strengths as a poet--uncanny resistance to simple truth, her narratives that will not cohere--are all but ignored in this volume. Instead, we get an exasperating sameness to her work: general distress, marked by general language. Much has been made of Graham's difficulty, but this volume contradicts that. The cultural and philosphical rootlessness the poet expresses here is simple, unanchored and merely assumed. It is not at all illuminated or re-defined.

Nobody but Jorie Graham could write poetry this intense, structural, abstract, and do it successfully. The first aspect of this poetry that one notices is that Jorie Graham has left the standard line/narrative/physical world format almost completely behind, writing a lot of one-line stanzas, and leaving large space between words for the reader to fill. It doesn't look like standard poetry (well, maybe a poem or two do). The second aspect of the poetry in this book is that she's taken words so far from solid ground and scattered them into the stratosphere. In this book you will not find any images like salmon swimming upstream...you will find a minimalism of words where possible, attaching to concepts, not anything sensory that's so easy to hold onto. In Swarm, you're more likely to find lines like "Where definition first comes upon us empire" or "Explain inseparable explain common". At first you will not understand the connections between these words, but they are there, and they are vast. From the first poem to to the last and still reflectng back on it, I've always hoped this book would be remembered in the annals of poetry as the revolutionary book that it is. Jorie Graham is the poet to start a new poetic era. Read this book, you'll find her "planting a wildfire in your head".

And after seeing how people either seem to love this book or hate it according to the reviews here, Swarm is controversial if nothing else.

Yes, I will confess: I never had a clue what Jorie Graham was about. Almost didn't care; though something appealed to me in the fragment, the frenetic jump, the denial of imposition of meaning, the coy opening of the poet's arms: daring me to climb inside, drown even. Well, "Swarm": I'm telling you, I still don't get it, but the book opens Graham's style wide, the way a drop of ink runs to gray in water. I can feel her hitting a fevered pitch in the form/al experimentation that began with "End of Beauty." No friends, these poems aren't any "easier" than the ones that came before--but there is something in them different, not any more closure, not any more willingness to help you navigate, yet the book itself coheres as a unit. Past the the pre-lingual linguistic utterances I can detect repeated themes, scattered clues. I've read and re-read the book three times now and plan to continue. I hate to sound like one of the "converted" but I must say I am beginning to believe Jorie Graham has something to do with my daily life, my understanding of this strange sign-driven world, my hapless navigation through it.

Swarm is an extraordinarily moving and brilliant new book of poems by Jorie Graham. "To all except anguish, the mind soon adjusts," she quotes from Emily Dickinson. These meditations on presence, silence, and loss may seem abstract at first, but in fact are about experiences common to us all. Try reading the poems aloud--they will teach you how to read them. And the subtle and intricate layering of meaning will become more and more apparent to you.

Swarm literally kills me. not literarily, literally. I'm passionate about feats of intelligence and poetry and this is up there. I've read all of her books, my opinion shifts, but swarm is in the top tier (so crass that there should be tiers but passions have opinions). so different from the forms of her other works, this seems a distillation, a bare minimum necessary to float a story. These poems are like nets, split here an there but nonetheless ambitiously gathering-in the blank space of the page. you could throw this gauntlet down next to a heidegger or a deleuze and it would make a pretty confidant. WHEW. My only complaint is that every copy i've gotten ahold of (floppy copies all) came unbound, possibly this recommends the work? unbindable? pardon the chuckles. READ IT.

She never was much of a poet, but now Graham has descended into pure unreadability. Meanwhile, Helen Vendler tries to compare her to Hopkins and Heaney. And Harvard sets her up as an eminence. These charlatans deserve each other, but leave poetry and its readers out of the loop. It's a preposterous episode in American letters!

It's fascinating I think that Jorie Graham's initial reviews for Swarm were rather scathing. Recently though they've warmed up to her and the book, and it is clear now critics widely consider the work an extraordinary glimpse at this master's mind and style. It's a lot different from Graham's usual, but then again Graham has made a name for herself and her interest in changing styles from book to book. I suggest sticking with it and giving it time! If you love Graham you'll love Swarm!

Sure, it's extraordinary. The reason it is extraordinary is quite simple, and to do with her epigraph at the start of 'The Errancy', which is that line from Wyatt, about seeking to catch the wind in a net. Here she pushes her whimsicality, her quite irritating unpindownableness to a new limit, and succeeds quite unexpectedly. It is an achievement, after all, to be unexpected more than once. She has done it, and remains credible: this spiny, out-of-focus poet, who somehow manages to make it mean something, so close to where others fall down. A GREAT BOOK.

SWARM is a complicated work to figure out: it frustrates, it antagonizes. This is precisely why we shouldn't dismiss it as an attempt simply to "baffle" lovers of poetry.

True enough: hardly any of the poems are palpable. Rather, most of them resist palpability. Read aloud, the poems, with their blank spaces and sporadic dashes, remind us of Emily Dickinson's poems. How, though, do we begin to make sense of her abstractions and unusual imagery? Essentially, readers must extract Graham's primary metaphors (i.e. veils, unrequited love, creativity, history, seasonal change and so on). Understanding how these metaphors and images are woven into SWARM's overall tapestry is one possible approach to understanding the volume as a whole. Firm believers that poetry is an evolving art will surely wish to read and appreciate SWARM.

Here's a poet worthy of that label they've slapped on her: genius. No need to be jealous, just willing to learn from her.