Chi Chi Trillip Trillip

Among​ the poems Edward Thomas drafted in 1916, shortly before he was posted to France, was ‘As the team’s head-brass’. The poet, seated in the boughs of a fallen elm, watches a ploughman at work ‘narrowing a yellow square/Of charlock’. He exchanges words with him as he pauses at the turn of each furrow, so that the conversational back and forth maps at intervals onto the changing geometry of the field. This perfectly timed exercise in labour and talk is also a masterpiece of displacement: trench warfare presses at its margins (‘Have you been out?’, the speaker asks the ploughman), and its final turn is darkly prescient, in retrospect, of the field in which Thomas was to fall a year later – at Arras, in 1917. ‘The horses started and for the last time/I watched the clods crumble and topple over/After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.’

Later poets have followed in Thomas’s footsteps. When Seamus Heaney was commissioned to write a poem to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, he remade ‘As the team’s head-brass’ as the story of a soldier’s homecoming. His poem, too, was to serve as a valediction: ‘In a Field’ was one of Heaney’s last works. Thomas had been among his guides from the outset. Heaney’s ‘Follower’, from his first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), took soundings from ‘As the team’s head-brass’: its tripping between ‘furrow’ and ‘narrowed’, ‘fell’ and ‘follow’ nods to Thomas’s strewn doublings (‘fallen’, ‘fallow’, ‘narrowing’, ‘yellow’), and its closing reversal – ‘But today/It is my father who keeps stumbling/Behind me, and will not go away’ – surely got its bearings from Thomas’s last lines.

Jorie Graham, who followed Heaney as Harvard’s Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory in 1999, returned to that same Thomas poem in her collection Runaway. ‘The Hiddenness of the World’ works back through Thomas’s lines and dwells especially on the lovers who disappear into the wood at his poem’s start and re-emerge near its end, their hiddenness obscurely bracketing the sharp geometry of Thomas’s ploughed field. The wood is the poem’s defining elsewhere, a darkly intimate space (what do the lovers do in – or out – there, for the poem’s duration?) and a place that haunts the ‘woulds’ of its conditional mood: had his mate not gone out to France and been killed, Thomas’s ploughman says, ‘we should have moved the tree.’ ‘And I should not have sat here,’ the poet replies. ‘Everything/Would have been different. For it would have been/Another world.’ Other worlds and counterfactual routes through time – hidden elsewheres that edge the poetry’s field of view, tenses and moods that track the otherwise of indicative verbs and empirical histories – have caught Graham’s restless attention on and off for half a century. Bracketed places, ghostly might-have-beens and future anteriors have become a feature of her 21st-century books: Sea Change (2008), PLACE (2012), Fast (2017), Runaway (2020) – four volumes subsequently published together as [To] the Last [Be] Human (2022) – and, more recently, To 2040.

Graham’s verse has found itself increasingly drawn towards geopolitical urgencies. Sea Change turned explicit attention to global politics in ‘Guantánamo’; a residual sense of the war on terror distended the frame of the astonishing ‘On the Virtue of the Dead Tree’ in PLACE. As with Thomas, the field here is surveilled from a perch in the branches of a dead tree; the watcher is a hawk whose shifty alterity is caught but not tamed in Graham’s expert handling:

                                  And that it
                              may choose its
                              spot so
freely, from which to scan, and, without more than the wintry beguiling
                              wingstrokes seeding
                              the fields of air,
swoop. It feeds.

The carefully scanned field turns up broken body parts and the implements of enhanced interrogation (rubber hose, taser, hood), remnants of that extraterritorial prison which remains under US jurisdiction yet beyond the reach of law. Where does such a perversely cruel state of exception and its indefinite detentions belong? Its holding place in Graham’s work is a set of unsteady relations between the bare life to which the human subject is reduced under torture and the dead tree (both have limbs and trunk) and between a songless predator and hawkish politics. Sometimes the verse is lured close to flat protest (‘Prison is never/going to be/over’), yet ‘On the Virtue of the Dead Tree’ regains its gravity in a staggering overlay of darkness and threat at its close:

the holy place shuts, baggy with evening, and here it is
                              finally night
                              bursting open
with hunt.

Baggy with evening, bursting with hunt, soggy with melt: such phrases are characteristic of Graham’s idiom, as are compound substantives (‘the as-yet-not thing’) which, along with clusters of atemporal verb forms (‘the feeling of owning, accordioning out and up,/seafanning’), put up precarious bulwarks against what she once called ‘the swift scary suction of the sentence’.

The lyric’s capacity to dilate the present moment, to stay in the now, has been an enduring project for Graham, but it has become an ever more pressing preoccupation since Sea Change identified climate collapse as its saturating premise. ‘Later in Life’, for example, has construction workers calling to one another from street level to the seventh floor of a building, and that skein of sound – not unlike the bird songs that have threaded Graham’s verse, especially the arced back and forth of the cardinals in her fin-de-siècle ‘Red Umbrella Aubade’ – is newly weighted because of the still heat. In this weather a now fattened on ‘ing’ sits ‘Smack in the middle’:

                                                                             The
                              future is a superfluity I do not
                              taste, no, there is no numbering
here, it is a gorgeous swelling, no emotion

Such rotund plenitude, as sometimes with Wallace Stevens in mid-life, has just a tang of over-ripeness about it (later in life, after all, swellings may not portend well). Lateness or belatedness has always been Graham’s mode (‘it’s late in history after all,’ she said as early as 1987), so that her now is always on the verge of being a missed moment or déjà vu. Orpheus’s turn, both cause of and witness to Eurydice’s vanishing, was pivotal for Graham in The End of Beauty (1987), and seeing the harm you’ve done but being too late to repair it has had a more lethal cast this century, our ruin of the planet having gone past the point of no return.

Graham’s ‘Underworld’ and ‘Just Before’ imagine earth’s plenitude as a rich store of energy and a temptation to knowledge: ‘a fiery apple in the orchard, the coal in the under-/ground is bursting with/sunlight, inquire no further it says.’ Once mined, like a densely smouldering mass touched with air, this thickly interwoven underground explodes into ‘the urgent sprint’, the unstoppable trajectory of human history. That feeling of gorgeous plenty dragged into the slipstream of time, that turning-point-turned-tipping-point beyond which progress has its own momentum, picks up through the poems in Fast and out into Runaway, a book Graham has described as ‘a how-to manual on how to try to learn to ride these accelerating riptides written by someone caught in their ever-increasing tug’.

Graham has fretted over the relation between these large-scale temporalities and her own life – the ties of family, her mortality, and, in a different way, the lineage of lyric history. Each of these finds shape in that sense of an ending which she has felt in various degrees of magnitude over the past two decades. The 2040 of her latest book’s title addresses itself to the threshold of ‘an extinction scenario’; and the four books collected in [To] the Last [Be] Human are held together in part by the individual lives ended and begun in them. The death of Graham’s father in 2014 produced some of the most moving poems in Fast: ‘Reading to My Father’ and ‘The Post Human’ steady themselves in the aftermath of a death and wonder whether the lost person is ‘still here’, whether he is a pronoun (‘all of a sudden now I cannot write “your”/bed’), and how to keep him in time:

Now I wait here. Feel I can think. Feel there are no minutes in you –
Put my minutes there, on you, as hands – touch, press,
feel the flying-away, the leaving-sticks-behind under the skin, then even the skin
abandoned now, no otherwise now, even the otherwise gone.

Her father’s death loosens syntax as a place of safekeeping (‘the words don’t grip-up into sentences for me’), until a new arrangement can be found for him: ‘I watch your afterlife begin to/burn. Helpful. Making a space we had not used/before, could not.’ The loss of Graham’s mother, the sculptor Beverly Pepper, who died in 2020, takes a different form in the poetry, especially in two skinny poems from Runaway. ‘Un-’ finds a person unravelling into dementia becoming strangely more like herself: ‘blooming mother’s fists/tighten daily.’ Pepper’s raging hands still hold the furious energy of the sculptor she had been:

the surface a score you knew to scrawl mould bend, knew to
rip into – what
were u looking to re-
lease – tentacular furious careful – also
tapping – also pressing gently to feel for

edge – loved steel stone wood iron wax melt of
acetylene till yr glove
burned thru bc u
cld not wait

The loss of one’s parents puts a person on the front line, and in Graham’s case her own end became a stark reality in 2021, with a second cancer diagnosis about which she has spoken frankly: ‘My first cancer posited a demise way off in the future. My new cancer brings that horizon line, and its potential cut-off, right up close.’ Hence the sharply framed close-up in ‘I Catch Sight of the Now’: ‘square window in it, & slender citrine/lip onto which I place, gently, this first handful of hair.’

‘It’s incredibly hard,’ Graham has said, ‘to calibrate how to grieve the small death of your father, your friends – to face the small but important event of your own death – and simultaneously grieve the huge death of whole species.’ Yet despite that trouble with measure, the senses of ending on these different scales have renewed certain possibilities of lyric that have been latent in Graham’s poetry from the start. For Frank Kermode, the sense of an ending transforms mere successiveness (‘one damn thing after another’) into organised duration, turning chronos to kairos so that time ‘in the middest’ perfectly co-ordinates past, present and future. This work of patterning time in view of an ending is for Kermode the preserve of the novelist, whereas ‘in so far as there is an art of the timeless prison,’ he says, ‘it is poetry.’ For Graham, though, it is precisely the teeming possibilities of lyric – tense and mood, syntax and sound crossed with layout and measure – that harbour a fullness of time which is neither mere chronology nor novelistic plot. This is not least because poems are always reaching the ends of their own lines, and then reviewing those endings when they turn out to have been turning points.

Graham​ has continued to experiment with line length and layout in these latest books. For example, there is the shunted line that puts a second margin down the middle of the page, and which a helpful endnote in PLACE instructs us how to read (‘the two margins of the form ask us to feel the vertiginous “double” position in which we find ourselves, constantly looking back just as we are forced to try to see ahead’), or the right-justified pages that make you think, just for a moment, that you’ve opened the book upside down, and then, when you have righted yourself, make you wonder whether poet’s choice or printer’s accident has put the line break where it falls.

There have been novel experiments with punctuation too, as with the arrows that pepper the prosy layout of poems in Fast, and which according to the poet came about by accident (she typed a dash followed by a more-than sign, then ran with it). Take ‘Shroud’, for example:

I wrote you but what I couldn’t say→we are in systemicide→it would be good to be frugal→it is impossible not to hunger for eternity→here on the sand watching the sandstorm approach→remembering the so-called archaic→

I see the point, and Graham has spelled it out in an interview with Sarah Howe (‘this arrow just pushes forward. It insists’), but it does seem to starve the writing of those vectoring fields of possibility that ordinary syntax and punctuation can foster. It was a relief to come back to a quatrain poem such as ‘All’ at the start of Runaway, which looks like Graham putting a used vehicle through its paces without needing to try out all its gears: after all, the 4x4 has a full repertoire of literary historical uses built into it. ‘All’ is about what it feels like after rain, and it has some things to say about aftermaths, though it doesn’t press these too heavily:

completed, till it is done. But it is not done.
Here is still strengthening. Even if only where light
shifts to accord the strange complexity which is beauty.
Each tip in the light end-outreaching as if anxious

Graham’s poetry is sedimented with literary allusion. There’s a nod to John Donne in the epigraph to ‘All’; elsewhere, in ‘Cryo’, lines from The Shewings of Julian of Norwich make those punctuating arrows yet more strange; Emily Dickinson’s meditation on grief and form in the poem beginning ‘After great pain’ is ghosted in Graham’s ‘Underworld’, which starts ‘After great rain’; and her recent poetry has also been infiltrated by social media contractions and botspeak (the hawk on Graham’s dead tree does not sing but there is some twittering). An ear for machine language breeds some sonic pleasures, as at the end of ‘From Inside the MRI’:

                              one red light is
                              singing-out
chamber in use. And the bird sings. On its short loop, its
leash, it sings, here it is, here it comes again. Chi chi trillip trillip
                              chiuuu chip chip. No
                              matter
what you do, you are free. It is a nightmare. You are entirely free. There now,
careful now. You can go.

This is just what it sounds like inside an MRI machine; it also sounds as if John Clare has transcribed its song for us – and as if the kindly radiographer who helps the patient out at the end has heard the bird-like ‘Quick now, here, now, always’ that chirrups through Four Quartets. These are lovely moments, though the incorporation of botspeak can run the risk that a poem about posthuman language will itself end up just saying words. Graham has always been the most voluble of poets: a famously fluent educator, a generous interviewee who speaks up often for poetry’s meanings, and most recently, having decided that her students need her curation of the news, a prolific contributor to social media platforms. And there is something about the poetry which means that for all its experiments with voice – with modes of address, kinds of ventriloquy, sorts of listening – it always sounds like the same person talking.

There is new life in Graham’s latest books. Samantha Lorraine Almanza, Graham’s first grandchild, was conceived and born while she was writing Runaway and is that book’s dedicatee. ‘I Won’t Live Long’ has her standing at the shoreline feeling ‘the terrifying/suddenness of the/now’ with each wave breaking over her feet. It’s a now that an infant won’t remember, though the poem wants her to (‘Now. Remember now’). There is also a beautifully observed record of the child’s first steps:

                              One foot is set in place,
feels hard for place, then the whole of her eleven
months leans on it, lets go – is this trust now, first trust – uneven then
even – then the one step. All stops. She looks firmly at the emptiness.
It seems so full. What is it to go. Its gorgeousness

has not yet shown itself

All Graham’s habitual vocabularies are here – of forward propulsion, of hesitant stepping into time – as though they have been waiting for this new person to arrive as their singular embodiment.

Graham has said that much of Runaway was written for Samantha, or with her in mind. She adds: ‘If I am no longer here I hope she’ll find some clues in the book of what it was like to be human.’ Perhaps she meant by this that her granddaughter will know from the book what it was like to be human at a particular point in time; but Graham’s phrasing (what it was like to be human) flirts with the impossibility of a future anterior, a will-have-been that is legible (to whom?) beyond the extinction of the species. Timothy Morton has asked who will be here to mourn the end of a natural world of which we are part, and has bluntly reminded us that there is no position from which to write ecological elegy, because we will all be dead. Nor will the weeds of mourning survive our extinction, because the storehouse of tropes, the floral tributes in which poets have recorded loss, and in which elegists have found its compensations, will all be gone too. Much of To 2040 addresses itself to a world without us in it, yet its coda, ‘Then the Rain’, has the earth and the poet weep for their own dying. The poem begins by making us wait, in multiple subordinate clauses (‘after/much almost/& much never again, after’; ‘out of in-/congruity,/out of collision’) for a finite verb:

        out of the
accident of
touch, the rain

came.

This deluge comes as a relief, as though the grammar has been thirsting for its coming, and although the I that speaks the poem seems to have run out of time (‘Where are you my/tenses’) she can nevertheless, like a coda, speak back from a position beyond her own end.