FROM THE NEW WORLD (POEMS 1976-2014), BY JORIE GRAHAM
“… It is a tender / maneuver, hands making and unmaking promises,” Jorie Graham writes in her poem, “The Visible World.” The Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard professor rarely dips into the personal circumstances of her speaker in these mysterious poems, instead focusing on what the eye can see: “If I look carefully, there in my hand, if I / break it apart without / crumbling: husks, mossy beginnings and endings, ruffled / airy loam-bits, / and the greasy silks of clay crushing the pinerot in… / Erasure.” Graham continually returns her reader to the present in the natural world, shifting her vast poems mythically, biblically, and philosophically. Graham’s deft touch feels both believable and impossible at the same time, drawing me to turn the page back and back again to experience the slow unfolding of each poem. From the New World drew me in wonder by wonder and left me a little breathless, thinking both, I could never do that, and, Let me try.
