Abstract:

The foreward to Region of Unlikeness, Jorie Graham's fourth book of poetry, comprises a series of quotations from Augustine, Heidegger, the Bible, and Melville. And these pieces which she chooses as her introduction aptly point the way for what lies in the following pages, since they center around humankind's longing to encapsulate reality in the medium of history and our ultimate inability to do so.

Full Text:

The foreward to Region of Unlikeness, Jorie Graham's fourth book of poetry, comprises a series of quotations from Augustine, Heidegger, the Bible, and Melville. And these pieces which she chooses as her introduction aptly point the way for what lies in the following pages, since they center around humankind's longing to encapsulate reality in the medium of history and our ultimate inability to do so.

Graham's style in this book is a free-form mixture of the narrative and the lyric, and by weaving the personal with the historic, she juxtaposes the single moment with any number of moments that have gone before. One poem, "Holy Shroud," begins with the local by giving us the narrator's observations of a flock of cardinals which scout through sparse winter lots in order to find nourishment. But mid-poem the description shifts to another search, one of historic and religious import, with the discovery by Secondo Pia in 1894 of the face in the holy shroud through a negative photographic image, and the display of the shroud itself to a present-day crowd. Part of the crowd, the narrator expresses its longing for meaning from the relic:

When they held it up to us

we saw nothing, we saw the delay, we saw the minutes on it, spots here and there,

we tried to see something, little by little we could almost see, almost nothing was visible,

already something other than nothing was visible in the almost.

Thus the problem with the past is complex. Despite history's unreliability, it is something that we feel we need to turn to as a touchstone.

In another poem, "The Phase After History," Graham's narrator finds two birds trapped in her house which she tries to drive out by opening doors to "elsewhere." After her efforts, one bird remains, caught in the house which she identifies with an America we can no longer claim to understand. But the bird discovers the draft, which is "the cold current called history," and nearly kills itself from trying to reconcile history with present-day America. Its sense of truth, or the belief of all of us, soon hangs "flapping, half dead on the wing, through the / hollow indoors, / the house like a head / with nothing inside / except this breeze -." Graham asks, "Which America is it in? / Which America are we in here?"

The volume muses on the "coiling and uncoiling billions" of humans as they struggle through existence, but what Graham focuses on are the questions, not the answers. Very quickly readers will see that the question is central - it is inevitable in a world full of confusion. Though our impulse may be to "connect the dots," what we are surrounded by is as confounding as the televised mob scene described in "Who Watches from the Dark Porch":

the facts? spores? - flecks of information,

fabric through which no face will push, proof,

a storm of single instances,...

Region of Unlikeness is a philosophical book. And it is artful. There are times when the meditations on abstractions are too free-floating, when they are not tied clearly enough to the situation that has been given. But this is a minor point in view of the work overall. For its thinking, its brilliant meshing of subject matter, and its poetry, this is truly a first-rate book.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Fairleigh Dickinson University