Swarm

T S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery -- and Jorie Graham. The New Yorker places Ms. Graham in this distinguished line of poets, heralding the Pulitzer Prize winner as a profound voice in American poetry. Now, in her eighth collection, she further enhances her reputation with a book-length sequence of verse that is a stunning work of grandeur.

The New Republic writes, "for 'swarm,' in other words...read 'be born again.' Graham is writing about a spiritual turning point, a new beginning.... Beauty -- that is, the pure sense-perception which has long been a concern for Graham -- is no longer the most important criterion. Now goodness is...[and] the idea of submission, of obedience, without understanding: one must 'yield' before 'hearing the reason' for yielding."

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