Harvard Review Online published a somewhat mangled version of this review.
Reviewed by William Doreski
Jorie Graham has long been among our most conspicuously architectonic poets. Her formal experiments and innovations sometimes suggest the architectural playfulness of Culver City’s Hayden Tract or Boston University’s new Center for Computing & Data Sciences, which looks like a stack of misaligned stanzas. However, To 2040, her latest collection, moderates this tilt toward concrete and visual poetry. Some poems are right justified, which forces the eye to work against the grain, but most others are written in short-lined quatrains, a particularly reader-friendly format that she has used before, especially in her earliest books.
The insistence of this collection is not aesthetic so much as it is thematic. Graham faces the coming environmental apocalypse, an expression of her own mortality, and freeze-frames its many clues and symptoms. The disruption of right-justification intensifies the sense of crisis:
Everything hangs in the balance, say the looping vines
the late red light begins articulating. Think about it, they scrawl,
try to remember
what it was you loved, tried to clean up your memories
in time.
(“In Reality”)
The quatrain poems, however, ease the reader by allowing the eye to move normally from line to line. But they present other challenges. Like all of the poems in this book they address a second person with whom the reader might choose to identify. But identification is not enough. One of the central problems of 2040 is the construction of a self of sufficient perception and cognition to deal with the threat (or promise) of personal and species extinction. The search itself is threatening, as it mirror-reverses and internalizes perception so that it and cognition become indistinguishable:
Where
is my body to
guide me I
think. I tap at
the prisoner in
there, is that the
schoolroom, the
blank in the lesson,
is that my soul
gradually by its ten
thousand adjustments
to its own in-
creasing absence opening
too far. Is it blind. I
tap my face which is
gone on the glass which is
not gone. Don’t stop
I hear my mind hiss,
don’t stop for
anything.
(“I”)
As the title of this poem reminds us, I is someone else, as Rimbaud famously noted. But I is also the self being constructed on the page before us. And it is an invitation to reconstruct our own sense of personhood to face and redeem ourselves from the grammatical notion of “I” to enter a difficult process of reorientation. I have previously argued that Graham’s poetry tends to be more narrative than lyric. However, that is less true of this book, which is primarily lyric in its stance and tactics. Lyric poetry typically explores disjunctions: between self and another (love poetry); between self and nature (nature poetry); between self and the perceptible world (philosophical poetry); between self and the ineffable (religious poetry). Graham adds another disjunction: between the part of the mind that perceives nature and the part of the mind that is nature. At the same time, she juxtaposes her sense of her own mortality with the coming planet-wide extinction. This is complex territory, and Graham uses complex and subtle rhetorical devices to engage it.
Yet in her summary closing poem she invokes rain as the inclusive metaphor, a healing and critique. Here rain is not just a renewal but the embodiment of creation. The speaker (and someone else) first mistake it for wind. But they realize it is richer and more inclusive than wind, a source of memory and cosmic reach.
as if the air turned green,
as if the air were the deep in-
side of the earth
we can never reach
where it reaches out to
those constellations we have not
discovered, not named, & now
never will,
and which are not dead, no—
And it brought memory. (“Then the Rain”)
Then she steps out into the weather and sits on a wall and allows herself to be absorbed or sculpted by it. The rain, a process more than an event, assures her she isn’t dying, although much of this book suggest otherwise. The poem and the book conclude with the rain, wind, earth, seeds and everything else urging her to “touch it all, / start with your face, // put your face in us.” This play on “put your faith in us,” as a lesser poet might put it, leaps the disjunction between self and nature by asserting the sheer physicality of our bond. We are creatures, not abstractions. In reading Graham’s earlier work I thought she sometimes treated the self as an abstraction, as Wallace Stevens and other philosophically inclined poets often do. But this collection comes down firmly on the physicality of our being. Its urgency is infectious.
