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Sea Change is a poetry of the tipping point, when what is lost and damaged in our world and our humanity is forever irrecoverable, when time itself has disintegrated. Jorie Graham, acclaimed as one of America’s most innovative poets, writes in her new collection the words for the ‘silence-that-precedes’ the once-unimaginable future in which the only ways of being human we have ever known, can no longer be sustained. With a luminous formal beauty, Sea Change brings us to the threshold of that terrifying silence and affirms the fragile tenacity of the human essence that binds us to the world. It is poetry as urgent as it is essential.
'A mesmerising American voice.' - Helen Vendler, The New Yorker
'One of our most highly imaginative and innovative poets. Her speculative and sensual poetry echoes an aesthetic and cultural past but is, truly, like nothing we've seen before.' - Los Angeles Times
Cover painting Peter Sacks, I Remember Nothing, 2006, courtesy of Galerie Piece Unique. Photograph by Didier Morel. Cover design by StephenRaw.com.
Contents
I
SEA CHANGE 3
EMBODIES 6
THIS 8
GUANTÁNAMO 10
UNDERWORLD 12
FUTURES 14
II
LATER IN LIFE 19
JUST BEFORE 22
LOAN 24
SUMMER SOLSTICE 27
FULL FATHOM 30
THE VIOLINIST AT THE WINDOW, 1918 32
III
NEARING DAWN 37
DAY OFF 40
POSITIVE FEEDBACK LOOP 42
BELIEF SYSTEM 45
ROOT END 48
UNDATED LULLABY 51
NO LONG WAY ROUND 54
Praise for Jorie Graham:'The poems in Jorie Graham's Sea Change might look unapproachable but they are models of clarity and purity.' - Nicola Smyth, 'Books of the Year', the Independent, 28 December 2008
'One of the finest poets writing today.'
John Ashbery.
'She is among the most important poets in North American literature today.'
Peyton Brien, University of Toronto, 1995.
'Jorie Graham is a poet of staggering intelligence.'
James Tate.
'There is a buoyancy in Graham's poetry, a freshness of vision which is rare in contemporary poetry.'
Roger Caldwell, Times Literary Supplement, 27th June 2003
'After each new book by Graham, I wonder what she will do next. Her courage in remaking her style over the years is exemplary.'
Helen Vendler, London Review of Books, 23rd January 2003.
'...to read under Graham's powerful impetus is to have one's consciousness, like molten glass, pulled into unforeseen - and sometimes almost unbearable - shapes.'
Helen Vendler, London Review of Books, 23rd January 2003.
'...one of our most highly imaginative and innovative poets. Her speculative and sensual poetry echoes an aesthetic and cultural past but is, truly, like nothing we've seen before.'
David St. John, The Los Angeles Times, 1996.
'There are erotic poems, elegiac poems, and there are dauntingly difficult, allusive and even impenetrable poems. Throughout there is a powerful, engaging intelligence and an affirming lyric grace.'
Stephen Matterson on The Errancy, in Poetry Ireland Review, vol. 62.
'Like all good poets, she illuminates moments, but she is like no one else, neither in her rhythms, nor in her insistence on opening up, scrutinizing, and even reversing our experience of time and space within these moments.'
Stephen Burt, Times Literary Supplement, 17th May 1996.
'Graham shows us a future direction in American poetry, and that future is a welcome place.'
The Harvard Review.
'A mesmerising American voice; one wants to hear its ontinuation.'
Helen Vendler, The New Yorker.
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I am listening in this silence that precedes. Forget
