Dominic Bury reviews
by Jorie Graham
Most
striking about Jorie Graham’s Forward Prize winning collection of poems ‘P L A C E’ is not so much its accomplishments, of
which there are many, but what it attempts to realize. In eschewing traditional
form Graham’s ‘expanded lyric’ not only acts as an antithesis of ‘the pretty
little lyric’ predominant in British Poetry but also in doing so opens up the
possibilities of what a poem can achieve. The book is described by its
publishers Carcanet as being:
Written in the
uneasy lull of a world moving toward an unknowable future. Jorie Graham
explores the ways in which the imagination, intuition and experience help us to
navigate a life we will have no choice but to live. How does one think
ethically as well as emotionally in such a world? How does one think of one’s
children – of having brought a child into this world? How does love continue?
A
bold, albeit necessary poetics, it is the poems' form as supposed to their
diction that helps carry the subject matter. Through a lack of punctuation many
of the poems read almost in one breath, and this along with the canvass form
produces a sorrowful, almost mournful tone, a lament for the worlds Graham’s poems inhabit.
If
however, coming to terms, or navigating a future ‘we will have no choice to
live’, in which love has little chance of continuing is the function and role
of these poems then the diction does not quiet satisfy. Such a poetics should
be fraught with unease and violence, a violence that previously having run
subcutaneously to the continued gentility of society is now creeping to the
fore, in all its necessity. Yes, there are occasions, such as in ‘Sundown’ and
in ‘Mother and Child’ where an underlying sense of violence and unease are
hinted at, but Graham rarely sees them through to conclusion. Perhaps instead
it is the interplay of hints and snatches of sensory information, coupled with
a self-reflective, often questioning framework, that creates the lull which is
ascribed.
In
trying to do something different, there is always an element of risk, and there
are inevitably a few poems that don’t completely ‘come off’. The poem
‘Although’ is an example of this. The lines:
The vase of cut flowers
which the real is (before us on this page)
permeated
– is it a page – look hard – (I try) – this bouquet
in
its
vase
– tiger dahlias (red and white), orange freesia (three stalks) (floating
out),
one
large
blue-mauve hydrangea-head, still
wet
(this
bending
falling heavy with
load)
(and yellow
rose)
(wide
open head, three just-slitting buds) (also holding drops of rain)
Each
at
Diagonal,
urchins in sea sway, this
From
the real, which the real may continue (who can know
this)
offer
a rare example of when the sensory-intellectual interplay which characterizes
the book is not completely successful. At their best, the continuous broken
form of these poems have a forceful, almost ecstatic quality, and only on
occasion do they seem slightly cumbersome, as if perhaps they were written with
strict instructions on form, and would perhaps be better suited in a shorter,
more recognizable guise.
Nevertheless,
the construction of these poems is clearly the result of a great intellectual
and poetic mind. The form, the urgency, the ambition, the risk taking that
pervades these poems is the work of a poet who is comfortable in her own
bravura, and who is aware ultimately that in order to write great poetry, risk
is a necessity, even if at times, albeit seldomly in Grahams case, failure is
possible.
Bury is a recent graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at Kingston University, London. He is currently at work on his first collection.
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